There are, however, very considerable grounds for the opinion that Shakespeare had more than a layman’s acquaintance with the technical language of the law.  For it must be admitted, in the first place, that he exhibits a remarkable acquaintance with it.  That other playwrights and poets of his day manifest a like familiarity (as we have seen they do) precludes us, indeed, from regarding the mere occurrence of law-terms in his works as indications of early training proper to him alone.  But they who, on the strength of the not unfrequent occurrence of legal phrases in many of the plays and much of the poetry of the Elizabethan period, would maintain that Shakespeare’s use of them furnishes no basis for the opinion that he acquired his knowledge of them professionally, must also assume and support the position, that, in the case of contemporary dramatists and poets, this use of the technical language of conveyancing and pleading also indicates no more than an ordinary acquaintance with it, and that, in comparing his works with theirs in this regard, we may assume the latter to have been produced by men who had no professional acquaintance with the law; because, if they had such professional acquaintance with legal phraseology, its appearance in their works as well as in Shakespeare’s would manifestly strengthen rather than invalidate the conclusion, that his familiarity with it was acquired as they acquired theirs.  This position is, to say the least, a very difficult one to maintain, and one which any considerate student of Elizabethan literature would be very unwilling to assume.  For our ignorance of the personal life of Shakespeare is remarkable only because he was Shakespeare; and we know little, if any, more about the greater number of his literary contemporaries than we do about him.  It cannot even be safely presumed, for instance, that George Wilkins, the author of the law-besprinkled passage just above quoted from the “Miseries of Enforced Marriage,” was not a practising attorney or barrister before or even at the time when he wrote that play.  On the contrary, it is extremely probable, nay, quite certain, that he and many other dramatic authors of the period when he flourished, (1600-1620,) and of the whole Elizabethan period, (1575-1625,) were nestling attorneys or barristers before they became full-fledged dramatists.

We are not without contemporary evidence upon this point.  Thomas Nash, friend to Robert Greene, a playwright, poet, and novelist, whose works were in vogue just before Shakespeare wrote, in an “Epistle to the Gentlemen Students of the Two Universities,” with which, according to the fashion of the time, he introduced Greene’s “Menaphon” (1587)[D] to the reader, has the following paragraph:—­

[Footnote D:  Lord Campbell gives the date 1589; but see Mr. Dyce’s indisputable authority.  Greene’s Works.  Vol.  I., pp. xxxvii. and ciii.]