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VI

Law and Medicine in the Plaps

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." II. King Henry VI., iv. ii.-78.

HE lamented Richard Grant White was that rarest of all creations- a Shakespearean commentator with no nonsense about him. I think his entire character and career, his whole individuality—the exact, stiff justice and manliness of the mancannot be better expressed, summed up and covered than in one little note furnished by him to that most perplexing of all the "cruces Shakespeareana"-the lines in Hamlet, about that 'dram of eale." The note occurs in his edition of Shakespeare, published in 1865, and is briefly and tersely as follows:

"I leave this grossly corrupted passage unchanged, because none of the attempts to restore it seem to me even worth recording; and I am unable to better them."

man.

He

That seems to me to include the whole nature of the He was as incapable of sham work himself as he was intolerant of it in others. To guess or surmise without data or warrant,- to cover space with words which represented no information to be imparted, to assume comment where he could bring no help,- was simply impossible to his rugged, brusque honesty. His predecessors had speculated on that passage until their speculations could easily be collected into big volumes. had here an opportunity for a show of profundity which would certainly have been quoted and followed (for whatever one commentator says the next one echoes and discusses). But Mr. White was never afraid to say that he "didn't know"; and his contempt for any sort of pretense was fine and Italian. I am aware that this contempt for sham led him into bitternesses which lessened his friendships and made him enemies far and near. Nay, more, his very consciousness of honestythe fact that he had never made a comment without first testing his reading, and long revolving it— made him fierce in denunciation, not only of the prig or virtuoso, but often of the scholar as good as himself, who differed with him. That he himself suffered in heart from these enmities, I think I know. And so, in some sort, he was a martyr to his passion for exactitude. But I shall never cease to admire his rugged love of truth, and to hope we may have more like him yet. I doubt if it ever occurred to Mr. White that any moral maxim made it incumbent upon him to hate a literary untruth. With him an untruth did not exactly rise to the dignity of being hated. He

simply despised it, and, if he could, ignored it. But to ignore falsehood is not always possible.

It was this greatest characteristic of Mr. White's mind and method which led him, in 1859, when a volume (and there have been dozens of them since) whose purpose was to demonstrate that William Shakespeare was at one time an attorney, or an attorney's clerk, was put into his hands, to use all his powers of sarcasm to indicate what he thought of it. There had been a tradition (preserved by Aubrey) that young William had been apprenticed to a butcher; another (traced to Beeston, one of Shakespeare's fellows in Lord Strange's company of actors), to the effect that he had once been a schoolmaster-and traditions, however unreliable after the growth of generations, are not apt to be cut, at their very sources, out of whole cloth. But of Shakespeare as an attorney, or an attorney's apprentice, there was no tradition anywhere among the plenitude of them unearthed by the microscopic search of two centuries. So Mr. White, who had not the slightest respect for theories, quoad theories, or for mere tours de force, was prepared to give no very gentle handling to this one. But, this being early in his Shakespearean career, before his pen had been galled by question, he treated the fad more gayly than was his wont later on in that career. He began his review of this particular volume as follows:

1 At the close of a lovely summer's day, two horsemen might have been seen slowly pacing through the main street of Stratford-on-Avon. Attracting no little attention from the group of loiterers around the market cross, they

1 The "Atlantic Monthly," July, 1859, p. 84.

passed the White Lion Inn, and, turning into Henley street, soon drew their bridles before a goodly cottage, built of heavy timbers, and standing with one of its peaked gables to the street; on the door was a shingle, upon which was painted,

Will Shakspere.

Attornei at Lawe and Solicitor
in Chancere.

One of the travelers-a grave man whose head was sprinkled with the snows of fifty winters - dismounted, and, approaching the door, knocked at it with the steel hilt of his sword. He received no answer, but presently the lattice opened above his head, and a sharp voice sharply asked: "Who knocks?"

"Tis I, good wife!" replied the horseman, "Where is thy husband? I would see him!"

"Oh master John à Combe, is it you? I knew you not, neither know I where that unthrift William is these two days. It was but three nights gone that he went with Will Squele and Dick Burbage, one of the player-folk, to take a deer out of Sir Thomas Lucy's park; and, as Will's ill luck would have it, they were taken as well as the deer, and there was great ado. But Will-that's my Will- and Dick Burbage brake from the keepers in Sir Thomas's very hall and got off; and that's the last that has been heard of them; and here I be, a lone woman with these three children and Be quiet, Hamnet! would ye pour my supper all upon the hat of the worshipful Master John à Combe?"

"What! deer stealing?" exclaimed John à Combe: "Is it thus that he apes the follies of his betters? I had more hope of the lad, for he hath a good heart and a quick engine; and I trusted that ere now he had drawn the lease of my Wilmecote farm to Master Tinley here. But deer stealing!-like a lord's son or a knight's, at the very least! Could not the rifling of a rabbit-warren serve his turn? Deer stealing! I fear me he will come to naught!"

For my part I doubt if William Shakespeare could have been much of a "solicitor in chancere," whatever his practice as an attorney at law and draughtsman, since he makes Falstaff, a mere layman, talk down and discomfort a chief-justice, and try to borrow a thousand pounds of him into the bargain, a thing we lawyers know to be impossible! But Mr. White, while modestly claiming originality for the incident of the two horsemen and for one of them alighting-in the above sketch, is bound to admit that there is one thing under the sun that is not new, "and that is the representation of Shakespeare as a lawyer. Mr. White had only before him the works of Lord Campbell and Mr. Rushton. Had he taken up the subject again in 1885 (the year in which occurred his lamented death), he could have examined many further works all pressing the same representation. All these works prove the lawyer in Shakespeare by lists of legalisms and technical terms of the attorney's and the counsellor's craft, which, to a greater or less degree, their compilers find in the plays. But in 1884, Mr. Cushman K. Davis, ex-Governor of Minnesota, an eminent lawyer and ripe and thoughtful student of Shakespeare, put the question for the first time beyond this view, and presented scholars with a volume 1 which demonstrated that the very innermost and essential structure of these plays is legal; that their author was, so to speak, saturated with legal processes, especially familiar with the practice of courts; that his nature, like the dyer's hand, was subdued to what it worked in; that even his wit

1 The Law in Shakespeare. St. Paul: 1884.

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