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.
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 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.”
