Lord Campbell's Case – Part 1

§ I

[31] TAKING Mark Twain as the protagonist of the Baconian case, we have found him rejecting the normal view of the authorship of the Shakespearean plays on the strength of a series of gross errors as to the documentary evidence, and an all-pervading misconception as to the conditions of Elizabethan life. Protesting against the acceptance of "conjecture" as biographical material, he founded his own case upon mere wild misstatement in matters of notorious fact, followed up by an argument which on a little scrutiny is found to be wholly irrelevant. When, however, the whole case thus far is disposed of, the unabashed Baconians are found confidently justifying their unexampled "conjecture" by a proposition or propositions in regard to which they can claim the support of Shakespearean scholars of good standing—the general theorem, to wit, that the author of the plays in question was demonstrably possessed of a deep and technically expert knowledge of English law.

On the strength of this affirmation, confidently accepted by him from others, Mark Twain embraced the "conjecture" that Bacon wrote Venus and Adonis, The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Lear; and all the rest of the plays. In his view "we are entitled to assume" (even as Stratfordian biographers might put it) that where lawyers profess to find legal expertise in the plays they cannot be mistaken; that only a lawyer therefore [32] can have written them; and that the lawyer must have been Bacon. The foe of conjectures died ostensibly in full reconcilement to the conjecture that Hamlet was written by Bacon for a company of actor-partners, all in the secret, after the trial of Essex and while Bacon was scheming for the favour of King James; and that The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and Henry VIII were written under similar conditions of open secrecy by King James’ Solicitor-General—the last-named play just before his elevation to the Attorney-Generalship. And it is expressly insisted on that while thus carrying on a kind of authorship which he was deeply concerned to keep secret, Sir Francis, either deliberately or through inability to refrain from "talking shop," went on garnishing the plays with a multitude of legal expressions which to any trained ear must have betrayed their emanation from a legal source, and which, be it observed; he never introduces in his Essays.

To this extremity of conjecture we are exhorted to come on the bare authority, cited at third hand, of certain pronouncements by lawyers of high and other status, not one of whom had a fair knowledge of the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in general. In a dispute in which the principle of mere authority is expressly sought to be overthrown, we are asked to let an inference from the dicta of one or two purely legal authorities reverse at a stroke the whole structure of Shakespearean and Baconian biography. The authority of the great mass of Shakespearean students is to go for nothing, whether as to biography or as to comparison of styles; but the authority of certain lawyers, and these of the "idolatrous" school, is to settle once for all the question whether the author of the plays had a professional knowledge of law. Thus, it may be said, is idolatry pursued by its Nemesis: the Shakespeare-worshippers’ habit of ascribing to the author of the plays every accomplishment in a superlative degree is made a ground for taking away the Stratford actor’s [33] kingdom and giving it to another. And the same sequence occurs in respect of the ascription to the playwright of a wide knowledge of the classics. The idolaters, are in effect slain by their own lintel-stones. But for the non-idolater all this concludes nothing. As simple student, he asks:

1. What expressions, in which plays, prove the playwright to have had an incomparably exact knowledge of law, possible only to a trained lawyer?

2. Is it averred that the dramatic use of these expressions has the effect of making personages speak out of character, in respect of their being endowed with a legal knowledge which they could not reasonably be supposed to possess? If so, is this admitted to be a detraction from the dramatist’s own artistic credit? If, on the other hand, his characterisation is not on this score called in question, with what fitness can he be credited with abnormal legal knowledge on the score of expressions which can dramatically pass muster as "in character"?

3. Is it claimed that such legal expressions do not occur in the works of other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists in similar quantity and quality? Have the lawyers ever faced this problem?

4. How is it to be proved that the mere habit of haunting law courts, common to multitudes in Shakespeare’s day as in ours, could not yield to a quick mind precisely the amount of familiarity with legal terminology seen in the plays?

5. Is it true, as asserted by Lord Campbell and others, that the Shakespearean handling of law terms and phrases is constantly and impeccably correct?

6. Does Bacon, in his non-legal works, make any such play with legal terms and phrases?

Every one of these six questions, to raise no others, is vital to the issue which Mark Twain declares to be vital to the problem of the authorship of the plays. And he does not raise one of them; does not even indicate that [34] it has occurred to him that any one of them might be raised. He simply cites on the legal question nine pages of Mr. George Greenwood’s able but ex parte treatise, The Shakespeare Problem Restated, ascribing to that a conclusiveness which is denied to any argumentation on the "Stratfordian" side, and there makes an end of discussion on that issue, declared to be central.

Now, Mr. Greenwood, setting out to challenge the whole "Stratford" tradition, and all the dogmatism thereon accruing, has made out his own negative case largely by means of the uncritical deliverances of men who adhered uncritically to the tradition in question. He has done this as regards the vital problem of the classical learning said to be exhibited in the plays. Rejecting absolutely the late Mr. Churton Collins’s verdict on the main issue, he accepts without scrutiny Mr. Collins’s judgment on the primary point of the dramatist’s learning. Yet it can be demonstrated that at every important point Mr. Collins’s judgment breaks down on analysis.* The author of the plays exhibits, on exact scrutiny, no such learning as he ascribes to him. Ben Jonson’s ascription to Shakespeare of "small Latin and less Greek," which Mr. Collins arbitrarily and illicitly sets aside, turns out on close examination to be in perfect accord with the internal evidence of the plays, after these have been carefully considered with a view to the whole problem of authenticity. If, then, evidence which, with his own scholarly investigations, satisfies Mr. Greenwood as to the playwright’s learning, is found to be quite inadequate, evidence which satisfies him as to the playwright’s mastery of English law may turn out to be no less inadequate, albeit he is himself a lawyer.

The thesis of the juristic knowledge of the dramatist long ago set up by Steevens and Malone, on the basis of the "attorney’s clerk" tradition, is specially insisted [35] on by Mr. Churton Collins as part of his proof that Titus Andronicus is a genuine Shakespearean work. Now this, of all of "the" plays, has moved the largest number of critics to reject it, on general grounds, as alien work; and an all-round survey of the problem is found to bear out their conclusion. As to this, Mr. Greenwood is of my opinion. So far as demonstration in such matters can be said to be attainable, Titus is demonstrably the work, in the main, of Peele and Greene, with portions possibly by Kyd or Lodge or Marlowe.** Its legal allusions, then, tell of no legal knowledge on the part of the author of Othello, Coriolanus, As You Like It, and the unquestioned plays. Nor is this all. The legal knowledge exhibited in the plays is found to be assigned by the lawyers mainly on the score of phrases which will not in the least bear out their assertion. Mr. Greenwood cites (from Lord Penzance) the astounding judgments of Lord Chief Justice Campbell (afterwards Lord Chancellor) without quoting, save in subsequent discussion and in other connections, one specimen of the grounds given by his lordship for them; and Mark Twain thereupon adopts without inquiry a verdict which, had he had the grounds before him, he would, I believe, have regarded as much better matter for jest than any of the themes he has jested on—unless, indeed, he recognised in the Lord Chancellor a fellow humorist. It is important to keep in view from the outset the evolution of the argument; because Mr. Greenwood will be found ere long putting a thesis which is only in appearance Campbell’s, while citing Campbell’s pronouncements in support of it. Campbell goes about to prove his general proposition by a series of items of evidence, consisting substantially of legal phrases used in the plays. By that series of items his general pronouncement must stand or fall. But Mr. Greenwood at a certain stage of the debate in effect [36] repudiates the very grounds of Campbell’s judgment while asking us to accept that judgment as decisive.

§ 2

Let us first examine Lord Campbell’s entire case, put in the form of a letter to J. Payne Collier under the title Shakespeare’s Legal Acquirements Considered (1859).*** This case, which Mark Twain had never seen, and the tenuity of which no one could imagine from a mere reading of Mr. Greenwood’s extracts, made through Lord Penzance, is framed, bad as it is, merely to support the theory that Shakespeare may have been a clerk in a country attorney’s office.

Great as is the knowledge of law 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.†

And here, at the very outset, we have radical conflict between the champions of the lawyer theory. "We quite agree with Mr. Castle,"†† writes Mr. Greenwood, "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 [37] Courts, at a Pleader’s in Chambers, 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. Further, Mr. Castle finds plenty of law in plays in which Lord Campbell finds none; no law at all in plays in which Lord Campbell finds some; and "laughable mistakes" where Lord Campbell declares there is no deviation from strict legal accuracy. With Mr. Castle we shall deal later: for the present we have to follow the variegated reasoning of the Chief Justice.

It is significant of the texture of Campbell’s argument that after the explicit statement last cited from him he finds in the plays a "wonderful" and "profound"‡ knowledge of law—implying that profundity in that knowledge may be attained by a village attorney’s clerk in a few years. But still more staggering is the circumstance that after putting his whole case he writes: "Still I must warn you (Collier) that I myself remain rather sceptical. All that I can admit to you is that you may be right, and that while there is weighty evidence for you there is nothing conclusive against you."‡‡ And he further points out to Collier: "You must likewise remember that you require us implicitly to believe a fact which, were it true, positive and irrefragable evidence in Shakespeare’s own handwriting might have been forthcoming to establish. Not having been actually enrolled 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." [38]

Upon this caveat Mr. Greenwood expressly insists; and whereas Campbell’s argument went solely to prove possible clerkship, Mr. Greenwood turns his evidence to the support of the thesis that the playwright must have been a lawyer trained on a higher plane. He in turn refuses to accept the Baconian theory; whereas the Baconians turn his and Campbell’s arguments alike to the support of that. Mr. Greenwood must have a lawyer, but cannot accept Bacon, and can name no other. And the whole theorem rests on the forensic if not insincere reasoning of a judge who would have laughed the Baconian theory to scorn. Campbell’s argumentation, as he himself observed, is "worthy of Serjeant Eitherside"; and still it is the sole or main foundation of his summing-up or judgment, which constitutes Mr. Greenwood’s case. Lord Campbell had in fact been indulging in a forensic exercise, using the language of exaggerated conviction in the forensic manner, as a barrister would in a defence of a clouded client before an ignorant jury. To make clear the truth of this, it is necessary only to summarise his argument.

It sets out by taking for granted (a) that Nashe’s allusion, in the epistle prefixed to Greene’s Menaphon (1589), to "shifting companions that . . . leave the trade of noverint, whereto, they were born," must have referred to Shakespeare, in respect of the further allusion to Hamlet; and (b) that Greene, in respect of his later "Shake-scene" fling, must be held to have been party to the description of Shakespeare as a lawyer by trade. Now, it has long been established to the satisfaction, I think, of absolutely all Shakespearean scholars, that Nashe’s allusion is to Kyd, whose father was a law scrivener, and who was in all probability the author of the old Hamlet, upon which, by common consent (Campbell’s included), Shakespeare’s play is founded. Lord Campbell’s preliminary case thus goes by the board at once: the testimony of "two contemporaries . . . . who must [39] have known him [Shakespeare] well," with which he presents Collier at the outset, is a myth of mistaken inference. In passing, it may be noted that he is equally astray (p. 25) in taking Spenser’s "pleasant Willy" to be the dramatist. No scholar, at least, now agrees with him.

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* See the present writer's Montaigne and Shakespeare, and other Essays on Cognate Questions, 1909, per index. back

** See the present writer's Did Shakespeare Write "Titus Andronicus"? 1905. back

*** A year before, W. L. Rushton, then a law student, had published Shakespeare a Lawyer (Liverpool, 1858); and Mr. Jaggard writes, in his Shakespeare Bibliography (p. 271), that "Lord Campbell coolly plundered and plagiarised it a year later, in his imitation work, entitled Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements, without the least acknowledgment." But Rushton also followed Malone. Cp. Rushton's own Appendices to his brochure, Shakespeare's Testamentary Language, 1869. back

† Work cited, pp. 22-23. back

†† E. J. Castle, Shakespeare, Bacon, Jonson, and Greene: A Study, 1897, pp. 8, 26. back

††† The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 31. back

‡ P. 113. back

‡‡ Pp. 110-11. back