continuous employment involves the element of time, and time was
just what the manager of two theaters had not at his disposal.
In what portion of Shakespeare’s (i.e., Shakspere’s) career would
it be possible to point out that time could be found for the
interposition of a legal employment in the chambers or offices of
practicing lawyers?”
Stratfordians, as is well known, casting about for some
possible explanation of Shakespeare’s extraordinary knowledge of
law, have made the suggestion that Shakespeare might,
conceivably, have been a clerk in an attorney’s office before he
came to London. Mr. Collier wrote to Lord Campbell to ask his
opinion as to the probability of this being true. His answer was
as follows: “You require us to believe implicitly a fact, of
which, if true, positive and irrefragable evidence in his own
handwriting might have been forthcoming to establish it. Not
having been actually enrolled as an attorney, neither the records
of the local court at Stratford nor of the superior Court at
Westminster would present his name as being concerned in any suit
as an attorney, but it might reasonably have been expected that
there would be deeds or wills witnessed by him still extant, and
after a very diligent search none such can be discovered.”
Upon this Lord Penzance commends: “It cannot be doubted
that Lord Campbell was right in this. No young man could have
been at work in an attorney’s office without being called upon
continually to act as a witness, and in many other ways leaving
traces of his work and name.” There is not a single fact or
incident in all that is known of Shakespeare, even by rumor or
tradition, which supports this notion of a clerkship. And after
much argument and surmise which has been indulged in on this subject,
we may, I think, safely put the notion on one side, for no less
an authority than Mr. Grant White says finally that the idea of
his having been clerk to an attorney has been “blown to pieces.”
It is altogether characteristic of Mr. Churton Collins that
he, nevertheless, adopts this exploded myth. “That Shakespeare
was in early life employed as a clerk in an attorney’s office may
be correct. At Stratford there was by royal charter a Court of
Record sitting every fortnight, with six attorneys, besides the
town clerk, belonging to it, and it is certainly not straining
probability to suppose that the young Shakespeare may have had
employment in one of them. There is, it is true, no tradition to
this effect, but such traditions as we have about Shakespeare’s
occupation between the time of leaving school and going to London
are so loose and baseless that no confidence can be placed in
them. It is, to say the least, more probable that he was in an
attorney’s office than that he was a butcher killing calves ‘in a
high style,’ and making speeches over them.”
This is a charming specimen of Stratfordian argument. There
is, as we have seen, a very old tradition that Shakespeare was a
butcher’s apprentice. John Dowdall, who made a tour of
Warwickshire in 1693, testifies to it as coming from the old
clerk who showed him over the church, and it is unhesitatingly
accepted as true by Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps. (Vol. I, p. 11, and
Vol. II, pp. 71, 72.) Mr. Sidney Lee sees nothing improbable in
it, and it is supported by Aubrey, who must have written his
account some time before 1680, when his manuscript was completed.
Of the attorney’s clerk hypothesis, on the other hand, there is
not the faintest vestige of a tradition. It has been evolved out
of the fertile imaginations of embarrassed Stratfordians, seeking
for some explanation of the Stratford rustic’s marvelous
acquaintance with law and legal terms and legal life. But Mr.
Churton Collins has not the least hesitation in throwing over the
tradition which has the warrant of antiquity and setting up in
its stead this ridiculous invention, for which not only is there
no shred of positive evidence, but which, as Lord Campbell and
Lord Penzance pointed out, is really put out of court by the
negative evidence, since “no young man could have been at work in