(Weary of solid firmness) melt itself
Into the sea! and, other times, to see
The beechy girdle of the ocean
Too wide for Neptune's hips." **
And yet William Shakespeare had but two terms of Hunt, Jenkins and Stratford school! And, Mr. Malone believed, had never even gone so far into the classics as to have read Tacitus! ***
* "History of William Shakespeare, Player and Poet, with New
Facts and Traditions." By W. S. Fullom, London: Saunders,
Otley & Co., 66 Brook street, 1864.
** "King Henry IV.," Part II., Act 3, Scene i.
*** See ante, p. 88.
What was, or was not, taught at this marvelous Stratford school, "two terms," of which—between his poaching and his beer-bouting—were all the schooling William Shakespeare ever had, according to all bis biographies. (We say, all he ever had, because his father was so illiterate that he signed every thing with a mark, and so did his mother, and so did the rest of William's family; and the boy William was too busy at skylarking—according to those who knew him—to have had much opportunity of private instruction at the parental knee, even had the parental acquirements been adequate.) Were the theory and practice of the common law taught there? "Legal phrases flow from his pen," says Mr. Grant White, "as a part of his vocabulary and parcel of his thought.... This conveyancer's jargon ('fine and recovery,' 'tenure,' 'fee simple,' 'fee farm,' etc., etc.) could not have been picked up by hanging around the courts in London, two hundred and fifty years ago, when suits as to the title of real property were comparatively rare. And, besides, Shakespeare uses his law just as freely in his early plays, written in his first Loudon years, as in those produced at a later period." * And not only in the technique, but in the groundwork of that mighty and abstruse science, the law of England," is he perfect. A chief justice of England has declared that "while novelists and dramatists are constantly making mistakes as to the law of marriage, of wills, and of inheritance, to Shakespeare's law, lavishly as he expounded it, there can neither be demurrer, nor bill of exceptions, nor writ of error." **
* Memoir," p. 47. And see "Was Shakespeare a Lawyer?" By H.
T———-. London: Longmans, Green, Reader A Dyer, 1871.
** "Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements," Lord Campbell, p.
108. And see "Shakespeare a Lawyer," by W. L. Rushton.
London, 1858.
Were medicine and surgery taught there? Dr. Bucknill * asserted in 1860 that it has been possible to compare Shakespeare's knowledge with the most advanced knowledge of the present day. And not only in the general knowledge of a lawyer and a physician, but in what we call in these days "medical jurisprudence," the man that wrote the historical play of Henry IV. seems to have been an expert. Mr. David Paul Brown ** says that in "Frost's case" (a cause celebre of his day), on a trial for murder, the defense set up that the deceased had committed suicide. A celebrated physician being on the stand as an expert on this question, was examined as follows:
Q. What are the general indications of death from violence?