correctly without learning it with pick and shovel and drill and
fuse.
I have been a surface-miner–gold–and I know all its mysteries,
and the dialect that belongs with them; and whenever Harte
introduces that industry into a story I know by the phrasing of his
characters that neither he nor they have ever served that trade.
I have been a “pocket” miner–a sort of gold mining not findable in
any but one little spot in the world, so far as I know. I know
how, with horn and water, to find the trail of a pocket and trace
it step by step and stage by stage up the mountain to its source,
and find the compact little nest of yellow metal reposing in its
secret home under the ground. I know the language of that trade,
that capricious trade, that fascinating buried-treasure trade, and
can catch any writer who tries to use it without having learned it
by the sweat of his brow and the labor of his hands.
I know several other trades and the argot that goes with them; and
whenever a person tries to talk the talk peculiar to any of them
without having learned it at its source I can trap him always
before he gets far on his road.
And so, as I have already remarked, if I were required to
superintend a Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, I would narrow the
matter down to a single question–the only one, so far as the
previous controversies have informed me, concerning which
illustrious experts of unimpeachable competency have testified:
WAS THE AUTHOR OF SHAKESPEARE’S WORKS A LAWYER?–a lawyer deeply
read and of limitless experience? I would put aside the guesses,
and surmises, and perhapses, and might-have-beens, and could-have
beens, and must-have-beens, and we-are justified-in-presumings, and
the rest of those vague spectres and shadows and indefinitenesses,
and stand or fall, win or lose, by the verdict rendered by the jury
upon that single question. If the verdict was Yes, I should feel
quite convinced that the Stratford Shakespeare, the actor, manager,
and trader who died so obscure, so forgotten, so destitute of even
village consequence that sixty years afterward no fellow-citizen
and friend of his later days remembered to tell anything about him,
did not write the Works.
Chapter XIII of The Shakespeare Problem Restated bears the heading
“Shakespeare as a Lawyer,” and comprises some fifty pages of expert
testimony, with comments thereon, and I will copy the first nine,
as being sufficient all by themselves, as it seems to me, to settle
the question which I have conceived to be the master-key to the
Shakespeare-Bacon puzzle.
CHAPTER VIII
Shakespeare as a Lawyer {2}
The Plays and Poems of Shakespeare supply ample evidence that their
author not only had a very extensive and accurate knowledge of law,
but that he was well acquainted with the manners and customs of
members of the Inns of Court and with legal life generally.
“While novelists and dramatists are constantly making mistakes as
to the laws of marriage, of wills, and inheritance, to
Shakespeare’s law, lavishly as he expounds it, there can neither be
demurrer, nor bill of exceptions, nor writ of error.” Such was the
testimony borne by one of the most distinguished lawyers of the
nineteenth century who was raised to the high office of Lord Chief
Justice in 1850, and subsequently became Lord Chancellor. Its
weight will, doubtless, be more appreciated by lawyers than by
laymen, for only lawyers know how impossible it is for those who
have not served an apprenticeship to the law to avoid displaying
their ignorance if they venture to employ legal terms and to
discuss legal doctrines. “There is nothing so dangerous,” wrote
Lord Campbell, “as for one not of the craft to tamper with our
freemasonry.” A layman is certain to betray himself by using some
expression which a lawyer would never employ. Mr. Sidney Lee
himself supplies us with an example of this. He writes (p. 164):
“On February 15, 1609, Shakespeare . . . obtained judgment from a
jury against Addenbroke for the payment of No. 6, and No. 1. 5s.
0d. costs.” Now a lawyer would never have spoken of obtaining
“judgment from a jury,” for it is the function of a jury not to