Shakespeare and the Lawyers

O Hood Phillips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135032739
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

First published in 1972. Shakespeare's writing abounds with legal terms and allusions and in many of the plays the concept and working of the law is a significant theme. Shakespeare and the Lawyers gives a comprehensive survey of what Shakespeare wrote about the law and lawyers, and what has been written, particularly by lawyers, about Shakespeare's life and works in relation to the law. The book first reviews the recorded facts about Shakespeare's life and works, and his connection with the Inns of Court. It then discusses legal terms, allusions and plots in the plays; Shakespeare's treatment of the problems of law, justice and government; his description of lawyers and officers of the law; his references to actual legal personalities; and his trial scenes. Two further chapters consider the criticisms that have been made of Shakespeare's law, and the contribution to Shakespeare studies by lawyers.

I

Records of Shakespeare's Life and Work

Official records of the life and work of William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon are few, but not fewer than one would expect in the case of a man of Shakespeare's social position in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Records which had been discovered down to 1930 are contained in Sir Edmund Chambers's William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems.¹ Chambers, a leading Shakespeare scholar, classifies the records as Ecclesiastical, Court, Tenurial. Municipal, National, Legal, Occupational and Administrative; he later used them as a basis for a projected biography of Shakespeare.² The collecting of sources was begun in the eighteenth century by Edmond Malone, the Irish lawyer and Shakespeare editor, but the search still goes on, the most successful discoverer in recent years being the American scholar, Leslie Hotson.

The register of Stratford-on-Avon parish church records that Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere was christened on 26 April 1564. The entry is an official transcript, probably by the vicar. The original may have got the genitive of Johannes right. If the inscription on Shakespeare's monument³ (presumably the one mentioned in the First Folio of 1623) in Stratford parish church is correct in saying that he died in the fifty-third year of his age on 23 April 1616, he must have been born between 24 April 1563 and 23 April 1564.

We do not know which of his father's houses was his birthplace. Stratford-on-Avon magistrates in 1969 refused an application for a summons against the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust under the Trade Descriptions Act 1968. The Chairman of the Shakespeare Action Committee who made the application claimed that there was no evidence to show that the building in Henley Street was Shakespeare's birthplace. The Court found that the trustees were carrying out their obligations under the Birthplace Trust Act 1961, and were not carrying on a trade or business as defined by the Trade Descriptions Act.⁴

No record of Shakespeare's marriage has been found, but in the Bishop of Worcester's register there is an entry of a licence dated 27 November 1582, between William Shax-pere and Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton. This was a special licence enabling the marriage to be celebrated after only one reading of the banns, probably because Anne was pregnant. On the next day a bond was entered into by two Stratford farmers exempting the Bishop of Worcester and his officers from liability if by a marriage pre-contract or other lawful impediment William Shagspere was unable to marry Anne Hathwey of Stratford.⁵ The name Hathwey in the bond is probably right and the name Whateley on the record of licences an error,⁶ unless perhaps the two can be different versions of the same name: they are both still found with various spellings in Warwickshire at the present day.

The christenings of Shakespeare's three children are recorded in the register of Stratford parish church, that of Susanna about six months after Shakespeare's marriage. These are the only records of Shakespeare down to 1592, when he was twenty-eight years of age. The register of the scholars of Stratford-on-Avon Grammar School for that period has not been preserved. Hamnet (the name appears to be interchangeable with Hamlet), one of his younger twins, was buried at Stratford-on-Avon on 11 August 1596. The grant of arms to Shakespeare's father in the same year, manuscript drafts of which are in the College of Arms, entitled Shakespeare to call himself gentleman.

The burial of ‘Will. Shakspere, gent.’ is recorded in the register of Stratford parish church as having taken place on 25 April 1616. He is said to have been buried seventeen feet deep in the chancel, near the north wall. He had a right to interment in the church as part-owner of the tithes and therefore one of the lay rectors. His monument is on the north wall of the chancel.

There is evidence, much of it in unofficial documents, that Shakespeare was a successful actor-dramatist in London by 1592, writing for and acting with the Lord Chamberlain's Company (later the King's Men) from 1594. Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Phoenix and the Turtle and the Sonnets were printed under Shakespeare's name between 1593 and 1609; the first two being printed by Richard Field, son of a Stratford neighbour. The identity of the person to whom the Sonnets were dedicated by their publisher, Thomas Thorpe, has always been hotly debated. A barrister named J. Pym Yeatman has suggested that Mr W. H. may be none other than ‘William Hisself’.⁷ Quartos of a number of the plays were published in his lifetime as being by William Shakespeare, the first being Love's Labour's Lost (1598), and he is first mentioned in the Stationers' Register as the author of Much Ado about Nothing (1600). More information is contained in Court accounts for plays and revels, and in the diary or account book of Philip Henslowe.⁸ For James I's procession through the City of London in 1604 four yards of red cloth were provided to Shakespeare and each of the other King's Men to make cloaks.

It is important to remember, in connection with the questions both of publication and of Shakespeare's will (which does not mention books or manuscripts), that there was no author's copyright in the modern sense before the Copyright Act, 1709.⁹ In Shakespeare's time the printing of books and the performance of stage plays were controlled by royal charter or order of the Council under a licensing system. Apart from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, printing was a monopoly of the Stationers' Company of London. Copyright in a book lay with the printer or publisher, who registered it with the Stationers' Company of which he was a freeman.¹⁰ Publication was often decided on to forestall pirating. A play was usually bought by a company of actors, whose property it became. Often they had commissioned it, and they acted it, usually from manuscript prompt copies, so long as it held the public favour. We do not know whether an author received payment for subsequent performances. The Master of the Revels licensed or censored plays for public performance. The Tonsons, who purchased the copyright of Paradise Lost and in 1709 published Rowe's edition of Shakespeare, came to be regarded as the proprietors of Shakespeare's plays, although as Lord Justice Mackinnon says we do not know that they had any assignment on which to rely.¹¹

Shakespeare became a sharer in such a company of actors. He also became a property-sharer or ‘housekeeper’. As an actor-sharer he was not only joint owner of plays, whether written by himself or others, but he would receive a share of the profit arising from the general charge for admission. As a property-sharer he was joint owner of the Globe (1599) and Blackfriars (1608) Theatres, as we learn from records of litigation in which the Heminges and Burbage were concerned,¹² and would receive part of the money paid for admission to the galleries.

From Pipe Rolls of 1598–9 and 1599–1600 we learn that Shakespeare owed what we should now call rates in Bishops-gate, and from depositions in the Court of Requests (1612) that he lodged for a time with the Mountjoys in Cripplegate. He does not appear to have owned a dwelling-house in London, but in 1613 he bought the Blackfriars Gatehouse from Henry Walker, citizen and minstrel of London, for £140, and mortgaged it the next day to the vendor to secure the balance (£60) of the purchase money.¹³ The form of the conveyance to Shakespeare and three trustees (including John Heminge) had the effect — whatever the purpose may have been — of preventing Shakespeare's wife from acquiring a right of dower in this property, for Shakespeare would only become sole owner if he was the last survivor ; meanwhile he could make another settlement. The conveyance and the mortgage both bear Shakespeare's signature.

Shakespeare was also acquiring landed property in Strat-ford-on-Avon. He bought New Place, the largest house in Stratford, in 1597.¹⁴ The garden only remains to-day. The fact, which has long attracted attention, that two transactions were involved in this purchase was the...