The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 04, No. 21, July, 1859

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!"

Act v. Sc. 4.

Cleopatra, too, who, we may be sure from her conduct, was addicted to very "low necks," after Antony's death becomes serious, and declares her intention to have something "after the high Roman fashion." And what but a reminiscence of the disgust which a tailor of talent has for mending is it that breaks out in the Barons' defiant message to King John?—

"The King hath dispossess'd himself of us;
We will not line his thin bestained cloak."

    King John, Act iv. Sc. 3.
A memory, too, of the profuse adornment with which he had been called upon to decorate some very tender youth's or miss's fashionable suit intrudes itself even in his most thoughtful tragedy:—

"The canker galls the infants of the Spring
Too oft before their buttons be disclos'd."

    Hamlet, Act i. Sc. 3.
In "Macbeth," desiring to pay the highest compliment to Macduff's judgment and knowledge, he makes Lennox say,—

"He is noble, wise, judicious, and best knows
The fits of the season."—Act iv. Sc. 2.

Not the last fall or last spring style, be it observed, but that of the season, which it is most necessary for the fashionable tailor to know. In writing the first scene of the "Second Part of Henry IV.," his mind was evidently crossed by the shade of some over-particular dandy, whose fastidious nicety as to the set of his garments he had failed to satisfy; for he makes Northumberland compare himself to a man who,

"Impatient of his fit, breaks like a fire Out of his keeper's arms."

And yet we must not rely too much even upon evidence so strong and so cumulative as this. For it would seem as if Shakespeare must have been a publisher, and have known the anxiety attendant upon the delay of an author not in high health to complete a work the first part of which has been put into the printer's hands. Else, how are we to account for his feeling use of this beautiful metaphor in "Twelfth Night"?

"Lady, you are the cruell'st she alive,
If you will lead these graces to the grave,
And leave the world no copy."

Act i. Sc. 5.

But this part of our subject expands before us, and we must stay our hand. We merely offer these hints as our modest contribution to the attempts to decide from phrases used in Shakespeare's works what were his avocations before he became a playwright, and return to Lord Campbell and Mr. Rushton.

When Malone, in 1790, broached his theory, that Shakespeare had been an attorney's clerk, he cited in support of it twenty-four passages. Mr. Rushton's pamphlet brings forward ninety-five, more or less; Lord Campbell's book, one hundred and sixty. But, from what he has seen of it, the reader will not be surprised at learning that a large number of the passages cited by his Lordship must be thrown aside, as having no bearing whatever on the question of Shakespeare's legal acquirements. They evince no more legal knowledge, no greater familiarity with legal phraseology, than is apparent in the ordinary conversation of intelligent people generally, even at this day. Mr. Rushton, more systematic than his Lordship, has been also more careful; and from the pages of both we suppose that there might be selected a round hundred of phrases which could be fairly considered as having been used by Shakespeare with a consciousness of their original technicality and of their legal purport. This is not quite in the proportion of three to each of his thirty-seven plays; and if we reckon his sonnets and poems according to their lines, (and both Mr. Rushton and Lord Campbell cite from them,) the proportion falls to considerably less than three. But Malone's twenty-four instances are of nearly as much value in the consideration of the question as Lord Campbell's and Mr. Rushton's hundred; for the latter gentlemen have added little to the strength, though considerably to the number, of the array on the affirmative side of the point in dispute; and we have seen, that, of the law-phrases cited by them from Shakespeare's pages, the most recondite, as well as the most common and simple, are to be found in the works of the Chroniclers, whose very language Shakespeare used, and in those of the playwrights his contemporaries.

Our new advocates of the old cause, however, quote two passages which, from the freedom with which law-phrases are scattered through them, it is worth while to reproduce here. The first is the well-known speech in the grave-digging scene of "Hamlet":—

"Ham. There's another: Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddits now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks? why does he suffer this rude knave, now, to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell him of his action of battery? Humph! This fellow might be in's time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries: Is this the fine of his fines, and the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt? will his vouchers vouch him no more of his purchases, and double ones, too, than the length and breadth of a pair of indentures? The very conveyances of his lands will hardly lie in this box; and must the inheritor himself have no more? ha?"—Act v. Sc. 1.

The second is the following Sonnet, (No. 46,) not only the language, but the very fundamental conceit of which, it will be seen, is purely legal:—

"Mine Eye and Heart are at a mortal war
How to divide the conquest of thy sight;
Mine Eye my Heart thy picture's sight would bar,
My Heart mine Eye the freedom of that right.
My Heart doth plead that thou in him dost lie