Lord Campbell's Case – Part 3

5. In the last-named play (iV, 2) we have the line:

One that before the judgment carries poor souls to hell,

and the phrase, "‘rested on the case," upon which the Lord Chancellor declares that "there we have a most circumstantial and graphic account of an English arrest on mesne process" ("before the judgment") "in an action on the case." It seems necessary to explain that [47] Dromio’s "before the judgment" has reference to the theological "last day"; and to suggest that the whole effect of the latter part of the passage quoted turns upon the naturalness of a serving-man’s fumbling with two legal tags, as serving-men and others constantly do throughout the bulk of Elizabethan drama. What would Lord Campbell have made, once more, of Mistress Honeysuckle’s speech in Westward Ho (ii, 1):

You have few citizens speak well of their wives behind their backs; but to their faces they’ll cog worse and be more suppliant than clients that sue in forma paper.

Dyce, who could not have dreamt of what a Lord Chief Justice could attain to by the light of a comprehensive ignorance of Elizabethan drama outside Shakespeare, has upon this the note: "Our early dramatists have a I pleasure in making their characters miscall terms of law," citing a similar instance from Rowley’s When You See Me You Know Me. Perhaps we may leave the point at that.

6. Rosalind’s gibe in As You Like It (i, 2): "Be it known unto all men by these presents," is cited for the purpose of suggesting that it was "introduced in order to show contempt for Nashe’s criticism." To this theorem is devoted a page of space. If we reply that Nashe’s criticism, as aforesaid, applies to Kyd, Lord Campbell’s successors will probably rejoin that on that view the phrase under notice must be held to stand for the dramatist’s tendency to talk law under any circumstances. It may therefore be worth while to ask whether the same theory is required to explain the passage in Cynthia’s Revels in which Jonson makes Amorphus read the "bill" beginning, "Be it known to all that profess courtship, by these presents": and again, whether it is further required to explain the citation of

in The Vision of Piers Plowman (ed. Wright, 1030-32); or the phrase Noverint universi in Chapman’s May-Day (ii, 1)?

7. It is considerately admitted that the words "testament" and "bankrupt," in Jaques’ speech (ii, 1), "might be used by any man of observation"; but it is claimed that in Act iii, 1, "a deep technical knowledge of law is displayed." The sole proof is the single phrase

To this demonstration is added the assurance that in Henry VIII (III, ii, 340) "we have an equally accurate statement of the omnivorous nature of a writ of Praemunire." As usual, there is nothing in the matter special to Shakespeare, who, as it happens, uses "the word Praemunire only once in all his plays." Extent "occurs in the pre-Shakespearean play Selimus, ascribed to Greene (Sc. 1, line 21):

and in Greene’s tract The Defence of Coney-Catching:

Greene, as we shall see, has many legal phrases not found in Shakespeare, and though no lawyer, uses them in a more lawyer-like fashion.

The meaning of a Praemunire, again, was presumably quite well known to Philip Stubbes, who in his Anatomie of Abuses warns all men that he who supports stage-plays "must needs incur the damage of praemunire";*** as it was to Foxe the martyrologist,**** and to Thomas Nashe, who in Pierce Pennilessse’s Supplication to [49] the Divell† suggests to that potentate that he might "make extent upon the souls of a number of uncharitable cormorants" who have "incurred the danger of a Praemunire with meddling with matters that properly concern your own person." Again, in Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem†† there is the phrase , "O pride, of all heaven-relapsing praemunires the most fearful"; and yet again in The Unfortunate Traveller:

In the same tale we again have "to extend upon," meaning "to make extent upon"; and in Massinger’s plays the phrase occurs repeatedly:

The meaning of "extent and the nature of a writ of Praemunire were in fact matters of common knowledge in Elizabethan days, and had been so long before her reign. In the Beggar’s Petition Against Popery, presented to Henry VIII in 1538, it is remarked that "Had not Richard Hunne commenced an action of praemunire against a priest, he had yet been alive, and no heretick at all, but an honest man."†††† The procedure of "extent" was at least equally familiar, and both terms were certainly understood by the writers who so often allude to them. If Lord Campbell had found in Shakespeare the lines:

spoken by Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts (ii, 1), or the phrase "That’s a shrewd premunire," in the same playwright’s The Old Law (v, near end); or Jonson’s lines

he would not have hesitated to pronounce that they showed a practical knowledge of the operation of the kind of writ in question. Yet no biographer has ever hinted that either Massinger or Jonson was a lawyer.

8. The phrase of Rosalind in You Like It (iii, 2) about lawyers "sleeping between term and term" is formally produced as showing that Shakespeare "was well acquainted with lawyers themselves and the vicissitudes of their lives"! With what zest, then, would his lordship have cited, if he could, the saying of Sanitonella in Webster’s The Devil’s Law Case, that "no proctor in the term-time be tolerated to go to the tavern above six times i’ the forenoon!" Must not Webster have been a lawyer?

9. Concerning Rosalind’s jest in As You Like It (iv, 1) "die by attorney," we learn that Shakespeare gives us the true legal meaning of the word ‘attorney,’ viz. representative or deputy." It will perhaps be equally edifying to mention that Ben Jonson exhibits the same recondite learning in The Alchemist (ii, 1):

and again in Cynthia’s Revels (v, 3, Palinode), in the phrase "making love by attorney." And Webster and Dekker, once more, jointly lay themselves open to suspicion of deep legal knowledge when they make Mistress Tenterhook say in Westward Ho (iii, 1): [51]

When they owe money in the city once, they deal with their lawyers by attorney, follow the court, though the court do them not the grace to allow them their diet.

10. Finally, it is explained that Shakespeare again evinces his love for legal phraseology and imagery "by making Rosalind say, ‘Well, Time is the old justice that examines all such offenders, and let Time try.’" By the same test, it must have been a writer steeped in legal experience who made Hammon in The Shoemaker’s Holiday (iv, i) woo Jane with the demand:

So that Dekker must have been a lawyer; unless, indeed, he has unconsciously revealed his avocation in the phrase, "that lean tawny-faced tobacconist Death, that turns all into smoke" (Old Fortunatus? i, 1). If he were not a tobacconist, he must needs have been a lawyer, since he makes the Duke in The Honest Whore (Part I, i, 1) tell Hippolito:

Apparently the Lord Chief justice would see a passion for legal phraseology in a modern allusion to "the bar of public opinion," to say nothing of the saw, "Time tries all," or "Time and truth try all," as Porter has it in The Two Angry Women of Abington (iv, 3). In point of fact the learned judge sees legal preoccupation in

11. Troilus and Cressida (iv, 5):

By parity of reasoning, Nashe was a lawyer, inasmuch as he wrote "Let Antiquity be Arbiter";‡ and again: "Judge the world, judge the highest courts of appeal from the miscarried world’s judgment, Oxford and Cambridge, wherein I have trespassed . . .";‡‡ and yet again [52] when he tells his antagonist, "All is ink cast away : : you recover no costs and no charges." By the same reasoning, too, it was a lawyer who described the sun as "indifferent arbiter between the night and the day" in the first sentence of Sir Philip Sidney’s ARCADIA; and another who spoke of "Nature’s Sergeant (that is Order)" in the Faerie Queene (B. VII, c. vii, 4). And what shall we say of the Reverend Philip Stubbes, who writes of "the high justice-of-the-peace, Christ Jesus"?‡‡‡

12. Dealing with Dogberry and Verges in Much Ado About Nothing, the Lord Chancellor concludes that "the dramatist seems himself to have been well acquainted with the terms and distinctions of our criminal code, or he could not have rendered the blunders of the parish officers so absurd and laughable"—absurd and laughable, that is, to an audience who in the terms of the argument could not appreciate the absurdity, being themselves devoid of the alleged "profound legal knowledge" of the dramatist. Thus can a judge reason. His further remark that in the line

"Dogberry uses the very words of the oath administered by the judge’s marshal to the grand jury at the present day," needs no comment. Does it require a lay mind to realise that the words must then have been known to myriads of laymen?

13. On the speech of Don Adriano in Love’s Labour’s Lost (i, 1) beginning "Then for the place where," and ending "a man of good repute, carriage, bearing and estimation," we have this pronouncement: "The gifted Shakespeare might perhaps have been capable, by intuition, (!) of thus imitating the conveyancer’s jargon; but no ordinary man could have hit it off so exactly, without having engrossed in an attorney’s office."

When therefore Puntarvole in Ben Jonson’s Every [53] Man Out of His Humour (iv, 4) begs the notary to draw the indentures, and gives directions, we know what to think. There are scores of lines such as these:

That, after the receipt of his money, he shall neither in his own person nor any other, either by direct or indirect means, as magic, witchcraft, or other exotic arts, attempt, practise or complot anything to the prejudice of me, my dog or my cat; neither shall I use the help of any such sorceries or enchantments, as unctions to make our skins impenetrable, or travel invisible by virtue of a powder, or a ring, or to hang any three-forked chains about my dog’s neck, secretly conveyed into his collar but that all be performed sincerely, without fraud or imposture.

Clearly, Ben must have "engrossed in an attorney’s office," unless, indeed, Bacon wrote Ben’s plays as well as Shakespeare’s, as not a few Baconians aver.

14. This, be it observed, is the sole example cited from that which passes for Shakespeare’s earliest comedy; in which, if ever, the proclivity of the "attorney’s clerk" to legal phraseology on his own account should have asserted itself. And from a comedy which is perhaps as early, and in any case is among the three or four earliest; Lord Campbell is again able to cite only one instance of legal phraseology:

On this Steevens had long ago observed, citing the attorney-clerk’s tradition, that "the line before us has an undoubted smack of legal commonplace. Poetry disclaims it." That is to say, the young poet was so much of an attorney’s clerk as to obtrude his office reminiscences where poetry would have been more appropriate. As it happens, the whole speech of Egeus in which the line occurs is prosaic; and once more the question arises whether the dramatist is or is not making one of his characters speak out of character. Lord Campbell, never asking the question, naively confesses that ""he prosaic formula runs: ‘In such case made and [54] provided.’" Then the attorney’s clerk is not true to his office reminiscences. But his lordship explains that the precise formula "would not have stood in the verse"—as if Shakespeare could not have made one line end with "in such case" and the next begin, "Made and provided"! And Mr. Grant White, carried away by Lord Campbell’s simple prosodical argument, writes of Egeus’ speech that "He pleads the statute; and the words run off his tongue in heroic verse as if he were reading them from a paper."‡‡‡‡

The process of self-confusion has here become curiously interesting. Lord Campbell admits the legal phrase to be laxly used, but pleads the trammels of the verse: Mr. White argues that the words run "in heroic verse, was if he were reading them from a paper"—when the whole speech of Egeus is in the same sort of verse, and any line might equally be said to run as if read from a paper. The simple fact is that the dramatist has put in the mouth of a lay citizen one of those more or less loosely used legal tags which are to be found in almost every play of the Elizabethan and Jacobean era. In an argument which undertakes to prove "profound legal knowledge," this rag of evidence is thus manipulated with a solemnity that transcends burlesque. If Shakespeare’s legal knowledge is to be thus proved, what diploma can be refused to the authors of such lines as these:

We may put off a commission: you shall find it

Well, if you’ll save me harmless, and put me under covert barn (= baron), I am content to please you.
      Dekker, The Honest Whore, Part I, iii, 2. [55]

Citizens’ sons and heirs are free of the house by their father’s copy.
      Dekker, The Honest Whore, v, 2.

Return your habeas corpus: here’s a certiorari for your precedendo.
      Peele, Edward I, ed. Dyce, p. 382

They’ll make a solemn deed of gift of themselves, you shall see.
      Jonson, Cynthia’s Revels, i, 1.

___________

* This word occurs in Titus Andronicus, where Lord Campbell had not noticed it. back

** Greene's Works, ed. Grosart, xi, 56. back

*** i.e. of damnation. Anatomie of Abuses, 1583, Collier's Rep. p. 140. back

**** Acts and Monuments, Cattley's ed. 1841, i, 25. back

† Nashe's Works, ed. McKerrow, i, 165. back

†† Ed. cited, ii, 80. back

††† Ed. cited, ii, 305. back

†††† Rep. in Harl. Misc. ed. 1808, i, 222, also p. 224. back

‡ Anatomie, of Absurdity: Works, ed. McKerrow, i, 16. back

‡‡ Four Letters Confuted, vol. cited, p. 302. back

‡‡‡ Anatomie of Abuses, 1583, Collier's Rep. p. 171. back

‡‡‡‡ Memoir of Shakespeare in 1865 ed. of Works, i, p. xlvi. back