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 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 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