Act iii. Sc. 4.

"Now must your conscience my acquittance seal."—Act iv. Sc. 7.

And because indentures and deeds and covenants are sealed, these passages must be accepted as part of the evidence that Shakespeare narrowly escaped being made Lord High Chancellor of England! It requires all the learning and the logic of a Lord Chief Justice and a London barrister to establish a connection between such premises and such a conclusion. And if Shakespeare's lines smell of law, how strong is the odor of parchment and red tape in these, from Drayton's Fourth Eclogue (1605):

"Kindnesse againe with kindnesse was repay'd, And with sweet kisses covenants were sealed."

We ask pardon of the reader for the production of contemporary evidence, that, in Shakespeare's day, a knowledge of the significance and binding nature of a seal was not confined to him among poets; for surely a man must be both a lawyer and a Shakespearean commentator to forget that the use of seals is as old as the art of writing, and, perhaps, older, and that the practice has furnished a figure of speech to poets from the time when it was written, that out of the whirlwind Job heard, "It is turned as clay to the seal," and probably from a period yet more remote.

And is Lord Campbell really in earnest in the following grave and precisely expressed opinion?

"In the next scene, [of "Othello,"] Shakespeare gives us a very distinct proof that he was acquainted with Admiralty law, as well as with the procedure of Westminster Hall. Describing the feat of the Moor in carrying off Desdemona against her father's consent, which might either make or mar his fortune, according as the act might be sanctioned or nullified, Iago observes,—

"'Faith, he to-night hath hoarded a land carack: If it prove a lawful prize, he's made forever';

the trope indicating that there would be a suit in the High Court of Admiralty to determine the validity of the capture"!—p. 91.

"Why did not his Lordship go farther, and decide, that, in the figurative use of the term, "land carack," Shakespeare gave us very distinct proof that he was acquainted with maritime life, and especially with the carrying-trade between Spain and the West Indies? We respectfully submit to the court the following passage from Middleton and Rowley's "Changeling,"—first published in 1653, but written many years before. Jasperino, seeing a lady, calls out,—

"Yonder's another vessel: Ile board her: if she be lawfall prize, down goes her topsail." Act i. Sig. B. 2.

And with it we submit the following points, and ask a decision in our favor. First, That they, the said Middleton and Rowley, have furnished, in the use of the phrase "lawful prize," in this passage, very distinct proof that they were acquainted with Admiralty law. Second, That, in the use of the other phrases, "board," and especially "down goes her topsail," they have furnished yet stronger evidence that they had been sailors on board armed vessels, and that the trope indicates, that, had not the vessel or lady in question lowered her topsail or top-knot, she would then and there have been put mercilessly to the sword.

But what shall we think of the acumen and the judgment of a Chief Justice, a man of letters, and a man of the world, who brings forward such passages as the following as part of the evidence bearing upon the question of Shakespeare's legal acquirements?—

"Come; fear not you; good counsellors lack no clients." Measure for Measure. Act i. Sc. 2.

"One that before the judgement carries poor souls to hell." Comedy of Errors. Act iv. Sc. 2.

"Well, Time is the old Justice that examines all such offenders,—and let Time try." As You Like It. Act iv. Sc. 1.

"And that old common arbitrator, Time." Troilus and Cressida. Act iv. Sc. 5.

"No cock of mine; you crow too like a craven." Taming of the Shrew. Act ii. Sc. 1.

"Bestial oblivion or some craven scruple." Hamlet. Act iv. Sc. 4.

By which last line, according to Lord Campbell, (p. 55,) "Shakespeare shows that he was acquainted with the law for regulating 'trials by battle'"!

But to proceed with the passages quoted in evidence:—

"Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled o'er, should undo a man? Some say, the bee stings: but I say, 'tis the bee's wax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since."—2 Henry VI. Act vi. Sc. 2.

Upon citing which, his Lordship exclaims,—

"Surely Shakespeare must have been employed to write deeds on parchment in courthand, and to apply the wax to them in the form of seals. One does not understand how he should, on any other theory of his bringing-up, have been acquainted with these details"!

One does not; but we submit to the court, that, if two were to lay their heads together after the manner of Sydney Smith's vestrymen, they might bring it about.

In aid of his Lordship's further studies, we make the following suggestion. He doubtless knows that one of the earliest among our small stock of traditions about Shakespeare is that recorded by Aubrey as being derived from Stratford authority, that his father was a butcher, and that "when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade, but when he kill'd a calfe, he wold do it in a high style, and make a speech." When his Lordship considers this old tradition in connection with the following passage in one of Shakespeare's earliest plays,—

"Who finds the heifer dead and bleeding fresh, And sees fast by a butcher with an axe, But will suspect 'twas he that made the slaughter,"—

2 Henry VI. Act iii. Sc. 2.

how can he resist the conclusion, that, although the divine Williams may not have run with "Forty," it is highly probable that he did kill for Keyser? Let his Lordship also remember that other old tradition, mentioned by Rowe, that John Shakespeare was "a considerable dealer in wool," and that William, upon leaving school, "seems to have given entirely into that way of living which his father proposed to him"; and remember, also, this passage from another of Shakespeare's earliest plays:—

"He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it…He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument." —Love's Labor's Lost. Act v. Sc. 1.

Is there not a goodly part of the wool-stapler's craft, as well as of the art of rhetoric, compressed into that one sentence by the hydraulic power of Shakespeare's genius? Does it not show that he was initiated in the mysteries of long and short staple before he wrote this, perhaps, his earliest play? But look again at the following passage, also written when his memory of his boyish days was freshest, and see the evidence that both these traditions were well founded:—

"So, first, the harmless sheep doth yield his fleece; And, next, his throat unto the butcher's knife."

Could these lines have been written by a man who had not been both a considerable dealer in wool, and a butcher who killed a calf in high style and made a speech? Who can have a doubt about this matter, when he appreciates rightly the following passage in "Hamlet," (Act v. Sc. 2,) and is penetrated with the wisdom of two wise commentators upon it?—

'Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well, When our deep plots do pall; and that should teach us There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will.'

Dr. Farmer informs me that these words are merely technical. A wool-man, butcher, and dealer in skewers lately observed to him that his nephew (an idle lad) could only assist him in making them;—he could rough hew them, but I was obliged to shape their ends! To shape the ends of wool-skewers, i.e., to point them, requires a degree of skill; any one can rough-hew them. Whoever recollects the profession of Shakespeare's father will admit that his son might be no stranger to such terms. "I have frequently seen packages of wool pinn'd up with skewers."—STEEVENS.

Lucky wool-man, butcher, and dealer in skewers! to furnish at once a comment upon the great philosophical tragedy and a proof that its author and you were both of a trade! Fortunate Farmer, to have heard the story! and most sagacious Steevens, to have penetrated its hidden meaning, recollecting felicitously that you had seen packages of wool pinn'd up with skewers! But, O wisest, highest-and-deepest-minded Shakespeare, to have remembered, as you were propounding, Hamlet-wise, one of the great unsolvable mysteries of life, the skewers that you, being an idle lad, could but rough-hew, leaving to your careful father the skill-requiring task to shape their ends!—ends without which they could not have bound together the packages of wool with which you loaded the carts that backed up to the door in Henley Street, or have penetrated the veal of the calves that you killed in such a high style and with so much eloquence, and which loaded the tray that you daily bore on your shoulder to the kitchen-door of New Place, yet unsuspecting that you were to become its master!

Yet we would not too strongly insist upon this evidence, that Shakespeare in his boyhood served both as a butcher's and a wool-stapler's apprentice; for we venture to think that we have discovered evidence in his works that their author was a tailor. For, in the first place, the word "tailor" occurs no less than thirty-five times in his plays. [The reader is to suppose that we are able to record this fact by an intimate acquaintance with every line that Shakespeare wrote, and by a prodigious effort of memory, and not by reference to Mrs. Clark's Concordance.] "Measures" occurs nearly thrice as often; "shears" is found no less than six times; "thimble," three times; "goose," no less than twenty-seven times!—and when we find, that, in all his thirty-seven plays, the word "cabbage" occurs but once, and then with the deliberate explanation that it means "worts" and is "good cabbage," may we not regard such reticence upon this tender point as a touching confirmation of the truth of our theory? See, too, the comparison which Shakespeare uses, when he desires to express the service to which his favorite hero, Prince Hal, will put the manners of his wild companions:—

"So, like gross terms, The Prince will, in the perfectness of time, Cast off his followers; and their memory Shall as a pattern or a measure live By which his Grace must mete the lives of others."

2 Henry IV., Act iv. Sc. 4.

And in writing one of his earliest plays, Shakespeare's mind seems to have been still so impressed with memories of his former vocation, that he made the outraged Valentine, as his severest censure of Proteus, reproach him with being badly dressed:—

"Ruffian, let go that rude, uncivil touch! Thou friend of an ill fashion!"