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.]
"I will turn my back to my first text of studies of delight, and talk a little in friendship with a few of our trivial translators. It is a common practice, now-a-days, amongst a sort of shifting companions that run through every art and thrive by none, to leave the trade of Noverint, whereto they were born, and busy themselves with the endeavors of art, that could scarcely Latinize their neck-verse, if they should have need; yet English Seneca, read by candlelight, yields many good sentences, as, Blood is a beggar, and so forth; and if you intreat him fair in a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets,—I should say, handfuls of tragical speeches. But, oh grief! Tempus edax rerum,—what is that will last always? The sea, exhaled by drops, will, in continuance, be dry; and Seneca, let blood line by line and page by page, at length must needs die to our stage."
It has most unaccountably been assumed that this passage refers to Shakespeare;[E] and it is even so cited by Lord Campbell himself,—to our surprise, when we remember his professional training and experience as a sifter of evidence. But, as far as regards its reference to a leaving of law for literature, it is clearly of general application. Nash says, "It is a common practice, now-a-days, amongst a sort of shifting companions, etc., to leave the trade of Noverint, whereto they were born, and busy themselves," etc. By the trade of Noverint he meant that of an attorney. The term was not uncommonly applied to members of that profession, because of the phrase, Noverint universi per presentes, (Know all men by these presents,) with which deeds, bonds, and many other legal instruments then began. And Nash's testimony accords with what we know of the social and literary history of the age. There was no regular army in Elizabeth's time; and the younger sons of gentlemen and well-to-do yeomen, who received from their fathers little more than an education and a very small allowance, and who did not become either military or maritime adventurers, opening their oyster with a sword, entered the Church or the profession of the law in its higher or lower grade; and as at that period there was much more demand for lawyers and much less for clergymen than there is now, and the Church had ceased to be a stepping-stone to political power and patronage, while the law had become more than ever before an avenue to fame, to fortune, and to rank, by far the greater number of these young gentlemen aspired to the woolsack. But then, as now, the early years of professional life were seasons of sharp trial and bitter disappointment. Necessity pressed sorely or pleasure wooed resistlessly, and the slender purse wasted rapidly away while the young attorney or barrister awaited the employment that did not come. He knew then, as now he knows, "the rich man's scorn, the proud man's contumely"; nay, he felt, as now he sometimes feels, the tooth of hunger gnawing through the principles and firm resolves that partition a life of honor and self-respect from one darkened by conscious loss of rectitude, if not by open shame. Happy,— yet, perhaps, oh, unhappy,—he who now in such a strait can wield the pen of a ready writer!—for the press, perchance, may afford him a support which, though temporary and precarious, will hold him up until he can stand upon more stable ground. But in the reigns of Good Queen Bess and Gentle Jamie there was no press. There was, however, an incessant demand for new plays. Play-going was the chief intellectual recreation of that day for all classes, high and low. It filled the place of our newspapers, our books, our lectures, our concerts, our picture-seeing, and, in a great measure, of our social gatherings and amusements, of whatever nature. It is hardly extravagant to say, that there were then more new plays produced in London in a month than there are now in Great Britain and the United States in a year. To play-writing, then, the needy young attorney or barrister possessed of literary talent turned his eyes at that day, as he does now to journalism; and it is almost beyond a doubt, that, of the multitudinous plays of that period which have survived and the thousands which have perished, a large proportion were produced by the younger sons of country gentlemen, who, after taking their degrees at Oxford or Cambridge, or breaking away from those classic bounds ungraduated, entered the Inns of Court, according to the custom of their day and their condition. They wrote plays in Latin, and even in English, for themselves to act; and they got the professional players to act popular plays for them on festal days. What more natural, then, than that those who had the ability and the need should seek to recruit their slender means by supplying the constant demand for new plays? and how inevitable that some of them, having been successful in their dramatic efforts, should give themselves up to play-writing! As do the great, so will the small. What the Inns-of-Court man did, the attorney would try to do. The players, though they loved the patronage of a lord, were very democratic in the matter of play-making. If a play filled the house, they did not trouble themselves about the social or professional rank of him who wrote it; and thus came about that "common practice" for "shifting companions" to "leave the trade of Noverint" and "busy themselves with the endeavors of art"; and hence it is that the plays of the period of which we are writing have, in many passages, so strong a tinge of law.
[Footnote E: It seems clear, on the contrary, that Nash's object was to sneer at Jasper Heywood, Alexander Nevil, John Studley, Thomas Nuce, and Thomas Newton,—one or more of them,—whose Seneca, his Tenne Tragedies translated into Englysh, was published in 1581. It is a very grievous performance; and Shakespeare, who had read it thoroughly, made sport of it in A Midsummer Night's Dream.]
One reason for the regarding of Nash's sneer as especially directed against Shakespeare is the occurrence in it of the phrase, "whole Hamlets,—I should say, handfuls of tragical speeches," which has been looked upon as an allusion to Shakespeare's great tragedy. But the earliest edition of "Hamlet" known was published in 1603, and even this is an imperfect and surreptitiously obtained copy of an early sketch of the play. That Shakespeare had written this tragedy in 1586, when he was but twenty-two years old, is improbable to the verge of impossibility; and Nash's allusion, if, indeed, he meant a punning sneer at a play, (which is not certain.) was, doubtless, to an old lost version of the Danish tragedy upon which Shakespeare built his "Hamlet."
We have, then, direct contemporary testimony, that, at the period of Shakespeare's entrance upon London life, it was a common practice for those lawyers whom want of success or an unstable disposition impelled to a change in their avocation to devote themselves to writing or translating plays; and this statement is not only sustained by all that we know of the customs of the time to which it refers, but is strongly confirmed by the notably frequent occurrence of legal phrases in the dramatic literature of that age.
But the question, then, arises,—and it is one which, under the circumstances, must be answered,—To what must we attribute the fact, that, of all the plays that have come down to us, written between 1580 and 1620, Shakespeare's are most noteworthy in this respect? For it is true, that, among all the dramatic writers of that period, whose works have survived, not one uses the phraseology of the law with the frequency, the freedom, and the correctness of Shakespeare. Beaumont, for instance, was a younger son of a Judge of the Common Pleas, and, following the common routine that we have noticed, after leaving the University, became an Inns-of-Court man, but soon abandoned law for literature; his friend and associate, Fletcher, was the son of a bishop, but had an uncle who was a lawyer and a diplomatist, and is himself believed to have been of the Inns of Court. Rich gleanings of law-terms might, therefore, be expected from the plays written by these dramatists; yet it may safely be asserted, that from Shakespeare's thirty-seven plays at least twice as many passages marked by legal phraseology might be produced, as from the fifty-four written by Beaumont and Fletcher, together or alone! a fact the great significance of which is heightened by another,—that it is only the vocabulary of the law to the use of which Shakespeare exhibits this proclivity. He avails himself, it is true, of the peculiar language of the physician, the divine, the husbandman, the soldier, and the sailor; but he uses these only on very rare occasions, by way of description, comparison, or illustration, when something in the scene or the subject in hand suggests them. But the technical language of the law runs from his pen as part of his vocabulary and parcel of his thought. The word "purchase," for instance, which in ordinary use means to acquire by giving value, in law applies to all legal modes of obtaining property, except inheritance of descent. And the word in this peculiar and most technical sense occurs five times in Shakespeare's thirty-seven plays, but only in a single passage (if our memory and Mr. Dyce's notes serve us) in the fifty-four plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. Equal, or greater, is the comparative frequency with which Shakespeare uses other legal phrases; and much wider is the disparity, in this regard, between him and the other dramatic writers of his whole period,—Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Kyd, Lilly, Chapman, Jonson, Middleton, Marston, Ford, Webster, Massinger, and the undistinguished crowd.
These facts dispose in great measure of the plausible suggestion, which has been made,—that, as the courts of law in Shakespeare's time occupied public attention much more than they do at present, they having then regulated "the season," as the sittings of Parliament (not then frequent or stated) do now,[F] they would naturally be frequented by the restless, inquiring spirits of the time, Shakespeare among them, and that there he and his fellow-dramatists picked up the law-phrases which they wove into their plays and poems. But if this view of the case were the correct one, we should not find that disparity in the use of legal phrases which we have just remarked. Shakespeare's genius would manifest itself in the superior effect with which he used knowledge acquired in this manner; but his genius would not have led him to choose the dry and affected phraseology of the law as the vehicle of his flowing thought, and to use it so much oftener than any other of the numerous dramatists of his time, to all of whom the courts were as open as to him. And the suggestion which we are now considering fails in two other most important respects. For we do not find either that Shakespeare's use of legal phrases increased with his opportunities of frequenting the courts of law, or that the law-phrases, his use of which is most noteworthy and of most importance in the consideration of the question before us, are those which he would have heard oftenest in the course of the ordinary business of the courts in his day. To look at the latter point first,—the law-terms used by Shakespeare are generally not those which he would have heard in ordinary trials at nisi prius or before the King's Bench, but such as refer to the tenure or transfer of real property, "fine and recovery," "statutes," "purchase," "indenture," "tenure," "double voucher," "fee simple," "fee farm," "remainder," "reversion," "dower," "forfeiture," etc., etc.; and it is important to remember that suits about the title to real estate are very much rarer in England than they are with us, and in England were very much rarer in Shakespeare's time than they are now. Here we buy and sell houses and lands almost as we trade in corn and cotton; but in England the transfer of the title of a piece of real estate of any consequence is a serious and comparatively rare occurrence, that makes great work for attorneys and conveyancing counsel; and two hundred and fifty years ago the facilities in this respect were very much less than they are now. Shakespeare could hardly have picked up his conveyancer's jargon by hanging round the courts of law; and we find,—to return to the first objection,—that, in his early plays, written just after he arrived in London, he uses this peculiar phraseology just as freely and with as exact a knowledge as he displayed in after years, when (on the supposition in question) he must have become much more familiar with it. Shakespeare's earliest work that has reached us is, doubtless, to be found in "King Henry the Sixth," "The Comedy of Errors," and "Love's Labor's Lost." In the very earliest form of Part II. of the first-named play, ("The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two Houses of York and Lancaster," to which Shakespeare was doubtless a contributor, the part of Cade being among his contributions,) we find him making Cade declare, (Act iv. Sc. 7,) "Men shall hold of me in capite; and we charge and command that wives be as free as heart can wish or tongue can tell." Both the phrases that we have Italicized express tenures, and very uncommon tenures of land. In the "Comedy of Errors," when Dromio of Syracuse says, "There's no time for a man to recover his hair that grows bald by nature," [Hear, O Rowland! and give ear, O Phalon!] his master replies, "May he not do it by fine and recovery?" Fine and recovery was a process by which, through a fictitious suit, a transfer was made of the title in an entailed estate. In "Love's Labor's Lost," almost without a doubt the first comedy that Shakespeare wrote, on Boyet's offering to kiss Maria, (Act ii. Sc. 1,) she declines the salute, and says, "My lips are no common, though several they be." This passage—an important one for his purpose—Lord Campbell has passed by, as he has some others of nearly equal consequence. Maria's allusion is plainly to tenancy in common by several (i.e., divided, distinct) title. (See Coke upon Littleton, Lib. iii. Cap. iv. Sec. 292.) She means, that her lips are several as being two, and (as she says in the next line) as belonging in common to her fortunes and herself,—yet they were no common pasture.
[Footnote F: Falstaff, for instance, speaks of "the wearing out of six fashions, which is four terms or two actions.">[