ignorance!
But such are the methods of Stratfordian controversy. Tradition is
to be scouted when it is found inconvenient, but cited as
irrefragable truth when it suits the case. Shakespeare of
Stratford was the author of the Plays and Poems, but the author of
the Plays and Poems could not have been a butcher’s apprentice.
Away, therefore, with tradition. But the author of the Plays and
Poems must have had a very large and a very accurate knowledge of
the law. Therefore, Shakespeare of Stratford must have been an
attorney’s clerk! The method is simplicity itself. By similar
reasoning Shakespeare has been made a country schoolmaster, a
soldier, a physician, a printer, and a good many other things
beside, according to the inclination and the exigencies of the
commentator. It would not be in the least surprising to find that
he was studying Latin as a schoolmaster and law in an attorney’s
office at the same time.
However, we must do Mr. Collins the justice of saying that he has
fully recognized, what is indeed tolerably obvious, that
Shakespeare must have had a sound legal training. “It may, of
course, be urged,” he writes, “that Shakespeare’s knowledge of
medicine, and particularly that branch of it which related to
morbid psychology, is equally remarkable, and that no one has ever
contended that he was a physician. (Here Mr. Collins is wrong;
that contention also has been put forward.) It may be urged that
his acquaintance with the technicalities of other crafts and
callings, notably of marine and military affairs, was also
extraordinary, and yet no one has suspected him of being a sailor
or a soldier. (Wrong again. Why even Messrs. Garnett and Gosse
‘suspect’ that he was a soldier!) This may be conceded, but the
concession hardly furnishes an analogy. 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
single scene, the diction and imagery of which is not colored 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. We quite agree with Mr. Castle 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 Chambers, and on
circuit, or by associating intimately with members of the Bench and
Bar.”
This is excellent. But what is Mr. Collins’ explanation. “Perhaps
the simplest solution of the problem is to accept the hypothesis
that in early life he was in an attorney’s office (!), that he
there contracted a love for the law which never left him, that as a
young man in London, he continued to study or dabble in it for his
amusement, to stroll in leisure hours into the Courts, and to
frequent the society of lawyers. On no other supposition is it
possible to explain the attraction which the law evidently had for
him, and his minute and undeviating accuracy in a subject where no
layman who has indulged in such copious and ostentatious display of
legal technicalities has ever yet succeeded in keeping himself from
tripping.”
A lame conclusion. “No other supposition” indeed! Yes, there is
another, and a very obvious supposition, namely, that Shakespeare
was himself a lawyer, well versed in his trade, versed in all the
ways of the courts, and living in close intimacy with judges and
members of the Inns of Court.
One is, of course, thankful that Mr. Collins has appreciated the
fact that Shakespeare must have had a sound legal training, but I