Mr. Rushton, Senator Davis, Mr. Castle – Part 3

It was evidently a normal term for the clergy. Bale has it many times:

Sincerely and faithfully, without craft or colour.
      The Image of Both Churches: Works, Parker Soc. ed. p. 265.

As the matter is without feigned colour in every point performed.
      Examination of Oldcastle, vol. cited, p. 43. [132]

Seekest . . . the blood of this innocent woman, under a colour of friendly handling.
      Examination of Anne Askewe, vol. cited, p. 162.

The Protestant Roye, who attacked Wolsey in 1528, has

Hooker uses it repeatedly:

Some judicial and definitive sentence, whereunto neither part that contendeth may under any pretence or colour refuse to stand.
      Pref. to B. I of Eccles. Polity (1549), ch. vi, 1.

Under this fair and plausible colour whatsoever they utter passeth for good and current.
      Id. B. I. ch. i, §1.

And in the Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiasticall issued in 1604 we have:

Spenser uses it in his View of the Present State of Ireland:

But what colour soever they allege, methinks it is not expedient that the execution of a law once ordained should be left to the discretion of the judge or officer.
      Globe ed. of Works, p. 639.

and in the Shaepheard’s Calendar (February) he has:

Among Shakespeare’s known books, again, we find the word in North’s Plutarch, as in these passages:

That it might appear they had just cause and colour to attempt that they did against him.

Cloak and colour the most cruel and unnatural fact.
      Life of Julius Caesar (Skeat’s Shakespeare’s Plutarch, pp. 13, 92);

and in many others, for which see Skeat’s index. The legal metaphor had in f act entered into the body of the language, and is as common in the drama as elsewhere. [133] It is used at least five times, with more or less concrete application, in Lady Lumley’s translation of Iphigenia at Aulus, written about 1550, the English law term being imposed on the classic diction.

If there is anywhere a "technical" use of the word in ordinary literature it is in Greene and Lodge’s Looking-Glass for London, where we have twice:

Jonson uses it with the same "legal" bearing:

How, how, knave, swear he killed thee, and by the law? What pretence, what colour hast thou for that?
      Every Man in his Humour, iii, 3.

Dekker and Webster are just as technical:

Massinger uses the term as does Shakespeare:

Similarly Chapman:

If there were not all this habitual use of the word in plays and books, the public were made familiar with it in the ordinary course of executive justice. An offender, we read, was pilloried with a paper on his breast stating that he was punished "For practising to colour the detestable facts of George Saunders’ wife."* But the literary, dramatic, and theological usage, as we have [134] seen, was universal. Shakespeare was in fact simply using the word as every one else did.

Thus Mr. Castle’s laboured argument from Shakespeare’s use of "colour" comes to nothing, being but one more instance of the "method of ignorance" by which the Baconians and the simple legalists alike proceed. When he goes on to set forth his view of the "legal plays" he pursues the same method; but in nearly every instance his argument destroys itself. Thus he contends that Measure for Measure is a truly legal play inasmuch as it shows knowledge of the law of precontract of marriage. He is aware that the play is founded upon Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra; and he avows that in refining upon the old plot by positing a precontract between Claudio and Julia the recast "takes all point out of the story," "so that in reality there is no motive left for the play."** This is partly true: the case of Julia and Claudio is on all fours with the case of Mariana and Angelo, in which the Duke, after treating Claudio as liable for the same thing to capital punishment, plans the intercourse of the precontracted persons. And we are asked to believe that the dramatist who thus played fast and loose with his legal plot was "one thoroughly acquainted with legal proceedings"!***

As if this were not fiasco enough, Mr. Castle adds a piece of elaborate nonsense in the shape of a theory that the name Escalus was coined from the "escue" in the name of Sir John Fortescue, the famous English judge and legalist. "Escalus" is the name of the Prince in Romeo and Juliet—the first name in the dramatis personæ of that play, produced long before Measure for Measure. Shakespeare got it from Brooke, and it was the kind of stage name that could do repeated duty. Over such a chimera one is disposed to ask what kind of minds we are dealing with in the debate over the "legal element" in the plays. [135]

On the general question as to Measure for Measure it suffices to say that Mr. Castle’s summing-up, to the effect that the play must have been "written either by one who has drawn the scene from the life or has been assisted by one well versed in the every-day life of English law courts," is naught. Many Elizabethan dramatists were so "versed"; and Shakespeare had the same opportunities as they. In reading Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament one can see that Nashe had attended courts.**** But who in his day had not? Had Mr. Castle read Chapman and Shirley’s play, The Admiral of France, he would have found a much more elaborate parody of legal proceedings, perhaps based upon a reading of French law reports. He gravely tells us that Angelo, when exposed by the Duke, "acknowledges his guilt as a lawyer would." The wicked judge in Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra and the corrupt Chancellor in The Admiral of France do the same thing. Were Whetstone and Chapman and Shirley then lawyers?

Proceeding in his vain task, Mr. Castle, after granting that Titus Andronicus is non-Shakespearean, insists upon treating the Henry VI plays as Shakespeare’s, representing that Malone pronounced 1 Henry VI non-Shakespearean "principally because there were certain contradictions about Henry’s age." This is an idle travesty: the ground on which Malone and the great majority of critics reject the play is substantially that of its plainly non-Shakespearean style. Mr. Castle accepts the argument in the case of Titus, and rejects it in the case of the other play, mainly because that course suits his argument. But we need not try that issue here. The authors of the play were probably Marlowe, Peele, and Greene; and that they were no more lawyers than Shakespeare might be gathered from Mr. Castle’s own argument. Thus he notes that in the third scene the law style of the proclamation is correct, adding: [136] "but the occasion was not one, in my opinion, in which it would or should have been used."† To what end, then, is all the learned research to show that the author exhibited special knowledge of Temple life in making Plantagenet say, "Come, let us four to dinner"? The recondite legal fact that "four makes a mess" was available to Shakespeare in Lilly’s Mother Bombie (ii, 1).

Coming to 2 Henry VI, we find Mr. Castle endorsing Lord Campbell’s deliverance in regard to the legal language of Jack Cade. Contentedly ascribing both the Contention and the later play to Shakespeare, he makes no difficulty over the discrepancy of "heart can wish" and "heart can think," and gravely concludes that "it requires a lawyer of some study to be able to quote from the Year Books, and we find the author of both Quarto and Folio doing this."†† So that, once more, Thomas Nashe was a lawyer of some study, inasmuch as he tells how his Piers Pennilesse has been

maimedly translated into the French tongue, and in the English tongue as rascally printed and ill interpreted as heart can think or tongue can tell.
      Have with You to Saffron Walden: Works, iii, 33.

Legal learning, as Hobbes would say, is capable of a more excellent foolishness than laymen could well attain to. If Mr. Castle had but read Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister, which was written about 1553, he would have found Gawyn Goodlucke saying to Dame Christian Custance (v, 3):

If he had read King Leir and His Three Daughters, he would have noted the line (sc. 24):

And if he had further read a little in Elizabethan literature outside of drama and law he might have divined that [137] ordinary folk in those days even read many "legal" documents for various reasons. When Nashe in his tirade against Harvey cries: "Letters do you term them? they may be Letters patents well enough for their tediousness. . . . Why they are longer than the Statutes of clothing or the Charter of London,"††† he is not addressing himself to lawyers. He knows that many lay folk had seen the Charter, and that many traders had read the Statute of Clothing; and when he speaks of "calling a fellow knave that hath read the Book of Statutes, since by them all in general they were made,"†††† he really does not mean that lawyers are all, or are the only, knaves, or that only lawyers read the volume. Even when he writes of

never reading to a period (which you shall scarce find in thirty sheets of a lawyer’s declaration),
      Lenten Stuff: Works, iii, 214,

he is assuming that others than lawyers have perused lawyers’ documents. That he was no lawyer may be held to be proved by his lines:

When Mr. Castle goes on to quote Gloster’s lines

with the comment that "All this correctly states the appeal by combat, the essential point of which is, there must be a doubt,"‡ he does but show that, like Lord Campbell, he knew nothing of Webster, who exhibits a detailed and technical knowledge of the law of trial by combat, without being a lawyer. Ten thousand laymen [138] could have said all that is implied in the lines cited; as they might have known and said that Gloster had used torture beyond legal rule.‡‡ It is edifying to learn that, on re-reading Henry VI, Mr. Castle finds "something fresh" for his purpose in the story of Gloster’s cross-examination of the sham blind-man. This, he assures us, is a further "trace of the author being acquainted with a lawyer’s training."‡‡‡ As if any intelligent layman who told the well-known tale would not have brought out the points in the same fashion.

It is after this lamentable series of non sequiturs that Mr. Castle claims to have indicated in Shakespeare’s works "not only the mere legal acquirements as collected by Lord Campbell . . . but . . . pictures drawn of the different members of the legal profession." What then are we to say of the "pictures" drawn by Jonson and Chapman, Greene, Webster, and Massinger? Mr. Castle modestly begins his preface with the avowal: "I have some doubts whether I should publish this book. The world does not like to have its established beliefs questioned . . . ." The world might fairly urge that those who undertake such questioning should take a reasonable amount of pains to prove their case. Mr. Castle has not done so. He writes concerning "Shakespeare, Bacon, Jonson, and Greene" without having read beyond Shakespeare and Bacon, save in so far as the commentators tell him of the relations of Greene and Jonson to Shakespeare. Of the plays of the two last-named, and of Greene’s prose writings, he appears to know nothing. He is careful and laborious in matters of strictly legal research: of the necessary literary research he has apparently no idea.

The result is that when he approaches the strictly literary question of the alleged coincidences of phrase in Bacon and Shakespeare he is wholly at the mercy of such an egregious guide as Mr. Ignatius Donnelly, from whom [139] he cites‡‡‡‡ instances of (1) identical expressions, (2) identical metaphors, (3) identical opinions, and (4) identical studies. Under the first head he gives only this egregious example:

In a later chapter we shall deal with that and many other of the alleged "identities" of expression in Bacon and Shakespeare. But it is impossible to part from Mr. Castle without a final protest against the sheer thoughtlessness of his handling of this aspect of his problem. From Mr. Donnelly, whose cipher he sees to be a farce, he accepts a few utterly inconclusive parallels as proof of Mr. Donnelly’s conclusion, without even putting the question whether other Elizabethan writers do not exhibit the same kind of "identities" with Bacon. In the same way he ascribes to Bacon and Shakespeare "identical studies" on the sole strength of one allusion in each to gardens and one to the formation of knots in trees, never even inquiring how it comes that all the main lines of Bacon’s studies and aims are wholly unrepresented in Shakespeare. Such incredible laxity in the handling of evidence would discredit any literary critic as such.

When it is exhibited by trained lawyers and judges, it is one more ground for disregarding their mere asseverations as to the presence of legal knowledge in the plays. If Mr. Castle’s argument be regarded as an improvement upon Campbell’s, the breakdown of the whole is complete, for his specially selected and presented instances of legal knowledge in the plays, as we have seen, are just as nugatory as the rest.

_________

* Brief Discourse of the Murther of George Saunders, 1573, in Simpson's School of Shakespeare, ii, 228. back

** Id. p. 37. back

*** Id. p. 41. back

**** Id. p. 50. back

† Id. p. 63. back

†† Id. p. 74. back

††† Have with You, as cited, p. 34. back

†††† Id. p. 119. back

‡ Work cited, p. 75. back

‡‡ Id. p. 76. back

‡‡‡ Id. p. 77. back

‡‡‡‡ Id. p. 196. back