The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Forty-Nine How Shakespeare went to work in a lawyer's office

There is another story (there always is). This version has Shakespeare passing his lost years in a lawyer's office.

I never knew a soul that wanted to believe this story true, perhaps because lawyers are not poetical figures. But then the late Mr Shakespeare was not a poetical figure either - go and look at the bust his widow and daughters had erected to commemorate him in Trinity Church, if you should doubt me; that bust is a pretty good likeness of the man in his later years, yet fitting not at all the common notion of a poet. With pork-filled face and portly torso, and with quill in fist, it might be taken for the portrait of a lawyer. Did Shakespeare ever go to work as one?

There is no evidence to support the theory. All that it rests on, when you get down to brass tacks, is the plethora of metaphors drawn from the legal profession to be found in his plays and in his sonnets. I turned up no decrepit litigants who remembered his service when I went looking for my items of country history in Stratford-upon-Avon. Nobody spoke of young Shakespeare as a clerk in the office of any of the town's attorneys of the time - not that of Thomas Russell (his mother's kinsman), not that of William Court, not that of the principal lawyer, Henry Rogers.

Absence of anecdota does not quite disprove the case, though. Your finest lawyers are invisible men. Shakespeare might have slaved away, head-down at his parchments, dealing with dozens of those minor legalities which call no attention to themselves, do not disturb the world by their redress, and which then disappear from the minds of men leaving no more trace than the dust blown away from an ancient writ. He might have worked thus for some years, I say, without anyone remembering him. And, in favour of the theory, since we must suppose that no poet could enjoy such labours, there is the heart-felt cry he puts in the mouth of Dick the Butcher, rebel Cade's right-hand man in Henry VI, Part 2: 'The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers!'

But, pardon me, I did not mean to bring this up. Nor do I intend to summon as witness to the crime of Shakespeare's lawyerhood each and every reference to 'quillets' and 'fee simples' and the like which we find in the plays. That Parolles, trembling and sweating under the examination of his captors, vomits up phrases from the deed-box, is not so very interesting. Nor is Hamlet's disquisition to an imaginary jury on the possibility of one of his disinterred skulls being that of a corrupt solicitor.

No, no, your worships, what I would prefer to draw to your attention is something that could never be anticipated - not a knowing reference to the law in a context where the action of a drama requires it, but a usage of legal terminology where it's not required at all. That Portia is a legalist proves nothing. That Silvia and Mrs Page are is a very different matter.

What I am driving at is the oddity of the way certain images drawn from the law keep cropping up in Shakespeare where we least expect them. I take it I do not need to quote sonnet 18? But if it is strange to find a poem in praise of a loved one's beauty suddenly prattling like any lawyer's clerk of 'leases' and 'dates', how much stranger to find Romeo (in the tomb with his heart breaking) pause above the body of Juliet to bid his lips:

seal with a righteous kiss

A dateless bargain to engrossing Death.

The last six words are very legal-minded. Not as persuasive or conclusive, perhaps, as REMAINDER BISCUIT. But since there is not a shred of evidence that Romeo was a lawyer then circumstantially at least those six words point back to the man who wrote them as the only other suspect who could have committed such an offence.

And there I would rest my case, were it not for NOVERINT.

This useful word derives, your honour, from the Latin. In that language it is the Third Person Plural of the perfect subjunctive tense of the verb nescere, to know. In English it occurs as the opening phrase of writs. Thus, noverint universi, 'let all men know'.

Now then, by extension this English word NOVERINT has come to be applied not just to a writ but to the man who writes it - in short, to any member of the tribe of legal scriveners.

And here I call to the stand the writer Thomas Nashe, dramatist and satirist, and author incidentally of the greatest work in English in praise of the red herring.* For in Nashe's epistle to the Gentlemen Students of Two Universities, printed in 1589, he writes scornfully of 'a sort of shifting companions' who 'leave the trade of Noverint' in order to 'busy themselves with the endeavours of art'. Such a one, he goes on, 'will afford you whole Hamlets - I should say handfuls of tragical speeches'.

Does Nashe mean Shakespeare? If he does, it means of course that a version of Hamlet existed some years before the one we first did at the Curtain. That is not impossible. For all that Mr Shakespeare (as Heminges and Cundell remarked) never blotted a line, he often reworked his own early plays, always improving them, and I have told you how he augmented the part of Juliet just for me. If you compare the versions of those plays published in Quarto form with the final texts of the same plays as they appear in the Folio you will see how Mr Shakespeare worked over the originals even after his retirement to Stratford. What Heminges and Cundell meant, I think, was that his fair copies for the theatre were always written out in a neat and legible hand - a noverint's hand, indeed, with its straight or gothic letters. Not like Ben Jonson's scrawl.

Taken at face value, Thomas Nashe's testimony does seem to intimate that he knows of a new writer coming up who has written something called Hamlet and that this writer formerly had employment in a lawyer's office. In tone and temper, it's worth pointing out, Nashe's little attack has something in common with the rather more notorious libel which was to be perpetrated three years later by Robert Greene, a drunken, disappointed hack who as he lay dying accused his young rival Shakespeare of being a thief and a plagiarist, 'an upstart crow'.

Greene was killed by pickle herring.

I'll be coming to that.

* Lenten Style (1599).