Here, then, is Shakespeare using the technical language of conveyancers in his earliest works, and before he had had much opportunity to haunt the courts of law in London, even could he have made such legal acquirements in those schools. We find, too, that he uses law-terms in general with frequency notably greater—in an excess of three or four to one—than any of the other playwrights of his day, when so many playwrights were or had been Noverints or of the Inns of Court; that this excess is not observable with regard to his use of the vocabulary peculiar to any other occupation or profession, even that of the actor, which we know that he practised for many years; but that, on the contrary, although he uses other technical language correctly, he avails himself of that of any single art of occupation with great rarity, and only upon special occasions. Lord Campbell remarks, as to the correctness with which Shakespeare uses legal phrases,—and this is a point upon which his Lordship speaks with authority,—that he is amazed "by the accuracy and propriety with which they are introduced," and in another place adds, that Shakespeare "uniformly lays down good law"; and it is not necessary to be a Chief Justice of the Queen's Bench to know that his Lordship is fully justified in assuring us that "there is nothing [of the kind (?)] so dangerous as for one not of the craft to tamper with our free-masonry." Remembering, then, that genius, though it reveals general and even particular truths, and facilitates all acquirement, does not impart facts or the knowledge of technical terms, in what manner can we answer or set aside the question that we have partly stated before,—How did it happen, that, in an age when it was a common practice for young attorneys and barristers to leave their profession and take to writing plays and poems, one playwright left upon his works a stronger, clearer, sharper legal stamp than we can detect upon those of any other, and that he used the very peculiar and, to a layman, incomprehensible language of the law of real property, as it then existed, in his very earliest plays, written soon after he, a raw, rustic youth, bred in a retired village, arrived in London? How did it happen that this playwright fell into the use of that technical phraseology, the proper employment of which, more than any other, demands special training, and that he availed himself of it with apparent unconsciousness, not only so much oftener than any of his contemporaries, but with such exact knowledge, that one who has passed a long life in the professional employment of it, speaking as it were officially from the eminent position which he has won,—Lord Campbell,—declares, 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 propounds it, there can neither be demurrer, nor bill of exceptions, nor writ of error"?
Must we believe, that the man, who, among all the lawyer-playwrights of his day, showed,—not, be it noticed, (as we are at present regarding his works,) the profoundest knowledge of the great principles of law and equity, although he did that too,—but the most complete mastery of the technical phrases, the jargon, of the law and of its most abstruse branch,—that relating to real estate,—and who used it very much the oftenest of them all, and with an air of as entire unconsciousness as if it were a part of the language of his daily life, making no mistakes that can be detected by a learned professional critic,—must we believe that this man was distinguished among those play-writing lawyers, not only by his genius, but his lack of particular acquaintance with the law? Or shall we rather believe that the son of the High Bailiff of Stratford, whose father was well-to-do in the world, and who was a somewhat clever lad and ambitious withal, was allowed to commence his studies for a profession for which his cleverness fitted him and by which he might reasonably hope to rise at least to moderate wealth and distinction, and that he continued these studies until his father's loss of property, aided, perhaps, by some of those acts of youthful indiscretion which clever lads as well as dull ones sometimes will commit, threw him upon his own resources,—and that then, having townsmen, perhaps fellow-students and playfellows, among the actors in London, and having used his pen, as we may be sure he had, for other purposes than engrossing and drawing precedents, he, like so many others of his time, left his trade of Noverint and went up to the metropolis to busy himself with endeavors of art? One of these conclusions is in the face of reason, probability, and fact; the other in accordance with them all.
* * * * *
But of how little real importance is it to establish the bare fact, that Shakespeare was an attorney's clerk before he was an actor! Suppose it proved, beyond a doubt,—what have we learned? Nothing peculiar to Shakespeare; but merely what was equally true of thousands of other young men, his contemporaries, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of those of antecedent and succeeding generations. It has a naked material relation to the other fact, that he uses legal phrases oftener than any other dramatist or poet; but with his plastic power over those grotesque and rugged modes of speech it has nought to do whatever. That was his inborn mastery. Legal phrases did nothing for him; but he much for them. Chance cast their uncouth forms around him, and the golden overflow from the furnace of his glowing thought fell upon them, glorifying and enshielding them forever. It would have been the same with the lumber of any other craft; it was the same with that of many others,—the difference being only of quantity, and not of kind. How, then, would the certainty that he had been bred to the law help us to the knowledge of Shakespeare's life, of what he did for himself, thought for himself, how he joyed, how he suffered, what he was? Would it help us to know what the Stratford boys thought of him and felt toward him who was to write "Lear" and "Hamlet," or how the men of London regarded him who was a-writing them? Not a whit. To prove the fact would merely satisfy sheer aimless, fruitless curiosity; and it is a source of some reasonable satisfaction to know that the very people who would be most interested in the perusal of a biography of Shakespeare made up of the relation of such facts are they who have least right to know anything about him. Of the hundreds of thousands of people who giggled through their senseless hour at the "American Cousin,"—a play which, in language, in action, in character, presents no semblance to human life or human creatures, as they are found on any spot under the canopy, and which seems to have been written on the model of the Interlude of "Pyramus and Thisbe," "for, in all the play, there is not one word apt, one player fitted,"—of the people to whom this play owed its monstrous success, and who, for that very reason, it is safe to say, think Shakespeare a bore on the stage and off it, a goodly number would eagerly buy and read a book that told them when he went to bed and what he had for breakfast, and would pay a ready five-cent piece for a picture of him as he appeared in the attorney's office, to preserve as a companion to the equally veritable "portrait of the Hon. Daniel E. Sickles, as he appeared in prison." Nay, it must be confessed, that there are some Shakespearean enthusiasts ever dabbling and gabbling about what they call Shakespeariana, who would give more for the pen with which he engrossed a deed or wrote "Hamlet," than for the ability to understand, better than they do or ever can, what he meant by that mysterious tragedy. Biography has its charms and its uses; but it is not by what we know of their bare external facts that
"Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And departing leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time."
What the readers of Shakespeare, who are worthy to know aught of him, long to know, would have been the same, had he been bred lawyer, physician, soldier, or sailor. It is of his real life, not of its mere accidents, that they crave a knowledge; and of that life, it is to be feared, they will remain forever ignorant, unless he himself has written it.
THE MINISTER'S WOOING.
[Continued.]