deliver judgment (which is the prerogative of the court), but to
find a verdict on the facts. The error is, indeed, a venial one,
but it is just one of those little things which at once enable a
lawyer to know if the writer is a layman or “one of the craft.”
But when a layman ventures to plunge deeply into legal subjects, he
is naturally apt to make an exhibition of his incompetence. “Let a
non-professional man, however acute,” writes Lord Campbell again,
“presume to talk law, or to draw illustrations from legal science
in discussing other subjects, and he will speedily fall into
laughable absurdity.”
And what does the same high authority say about Shakespeare? He
had “a deep technical knowledge of the law,” and an easy
familiarity with “some of the most abstruse proceedings in English
jurisprudence.” And again: “Whenever he indulges this propensity
he uniformly lays down good law.” Of Henry IV., Part 2, he says:
“If Lord Eldon could be supposed to have written the play, I do not
see how he could be chargeable with having forgotten any of his law
while writing it.” Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke speak of “the
marvelous intimacy which he displays with legal terms, his frequent
adoption of them in illustration, and his curiously technical
knowledge of their form and force.” Malone, himself a lawyer,
wrote: “His knowledge of legal terms is not merely such as might
be acquired by the casual observation of even his all-comprehending
mind; it has the appearance of technical skill.” Another lawyer
and well-known Shakespearean, Richard Grant White, says: “No
dramatist of the time, not even Beaumont, who was the younger son
of a judge of the Common Pleas, and who after studying in the Inns
of Court abandoned law for the drama, used legal phrases with
Shakespeare’s readiness and exactness. And the significance of
this fact is heightened by another, that it is only to the language
of the law that he exhibits this inclination. The phrases peculiar
to other occupations serve him on rare occasions by way of
description, comparison or illustration, generally when something
in the scene suggests them, but legal phrases flow from his pen as
part of his vocabulary, and parcel of his thought. Take the word
‘purchase’ for instance, which, in ordinary use, means to acquire
by giving value, but applies in law to all legal modes of obtaining
property except by inheritance or descent, and in this peculiar
sense the word occurs five times in Shakespeare’s thirty-four
plays, and only in one single instance in the fifty-four plays of
Beaumont and Fletcher. It has been suggested that it was in
attendance upon the courts in London that he picked up his legal
vocabulary. But this supposition not only fails to account for
Shakespeare’s peculiar freedom and exactness in the use of that
phraseology, it does not even place him in the way of learning
those terms his use of which is most remarkable, which are not such
as he would have heard at ordinary proceedings at nisi prius, but
such as refer to the tenure or transfer of real property, ‘fine and
recovery,’ ‘statutes merchant,’ ‘purchase,’ ‘indenture,’ ‘tenure,’
‘double voucher,’ ‘fee simple,’ ‘fee farm,’ ‘remainder,’
‘reversion,’ ‘forfeiture,’ etc. This conveyancer’s jargon could
not have been picked up by hanging round the courts of law in
London two hundred and fifty years ago, when suits as to the title
of real property were comparatively rare. And beside, Shakespeare
uses his law just as freely in his first plays, written in his
first London years, as in those produced at a later period. Just
as exactly, too; for the correctness and propriety with which these
terms are introduced have compelled the admiration of a Chief
Justice and a Lord Chancellor.”
Senator Davis wrote: “We seem to have something more than a
sciolist’s temerity of indulgence in the terms of an unfamiliar
art. No legal solecisms will be found. The abstrusest elements of
the common law are impressed into a disciplined service. Over and
over again, where such knowledge is unexampled in writers unlearned
in the law, Shakespeare appears in perfect possession of it. In
the law of real property, its rules of tenure and descents, its