not practically.
I have been a quartz miner in the silver regions–a pretty
hard life; I know all the palaver of that business: I know all
about discovery claims and the subordinate claims; I know all
about lodes, ledges, outcroppings, dips, spurs, angles, shafts,
drifts, inclines, levels, tunnels, air-shafts, “horses,” clay
casings, granite casings; quartz mills and their batteries;
arastras, and how to charge them with quicksilver and sulphate of
copper; and how to clean them up, and how to reduce the resulting
amalgam in the retorts, and how to cast the bullion into pigs;
and finally I know how to screen tailings, and also how to hunt
for something less robust to do, and find it. I know the argot
and the quartz-mining and milling industry familiarly; and so
whenever Bret Harte introduces that industry into a story, the
first time one of his miners opens his mouth I recognize from his
phrasing that Harte got the phrasing by listening–like
Shakespeare–I mean the Stratford one–not by experience. No one
can talk the quartz dialect 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 dialects 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 perhapes, and might-have-beens, and could-have-
beens, and must-have-beens, and we-are-justified-in-presumings,
and the rest of those vague specters and shadows and
indefintenesses, 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.
VIII
Shakespeare as a Lawyer [1]
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, of inheritance, to
Shakespeare’s law, lavishly as he expounds it, there can neither
be demurrer, nor bill of exceptions, nor writ of error.” Such