William Shakespeare: A Critical Study. Georg Brandes
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in his youth have been a clerk in an attorney's office—a theory which was thought to be supported by the belief, now discredited, that an attack by the satirist Thomas Nash upon lawyers who had deserted the law for poetry was directed against him.[3]
Shakespeare shows a quite unusual fondness for the use of legal expressions. He knows to a nicety the technicalities of the bar, the formulas of the bench. While most English writers of his period are guilty of frequent blunders as to the laws of marriage and inheritance, lawyers of a later date have not succeeded in finding in Shakespeare's references to the law a single error or deficiency. Lord Campbell, an eminent lawyer, has written a book on Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements. And it was not through the lawsuits of Shakespeare's riper years that he attained this knowledge. It is to be found even in his earliest works. It appears, quaintly enough, in the mouth of the goddess in Venus and Adonis (verse 86, etc.), and it obtrudes itself in Sonnet xlvi., with its somewhat tasteless and wire-drawn description of a formal lawsuit between the eye and the heart. It is characteristic that his knowledge does not extend to the laws of foreign countries; otherwise we should scarcely find Measure for Measure founded upon such an impossible state of the law as that which is described as obtaining in Vienna. Shakespeare's accurate knowledge begins and ends with what comes within the sphere of his personal observation.
He seems equally at home in all departments of human life. If we might conclude from his knowledge of law that he had been a lawyer, we might no less confidently infer from his knowledge of typography that he had been a printer's devil. An English printer named Blades has written an instructive book, Shakespeare and Typography, to show that if the poet had passed his whole life in a printing-office he could not have been more familiar with the many peculiarities of nomenclature belonging to the handicraft. Bishop Charles Wordsworth has written a highly esteemed, very pious, but, I regret to say, quite unreadable work, Shakespeare's Knowledge and Use of the Bible, in which he makes out that the poet was impregnated with the Biblical spirit, and possessed a unique acquaintance with Biblical forms of expression.
Shakespeare's knowledge of nature is not simply such as can be acquired by any one who passes his childhood and youth in the open air and in the country. But even of this sort of knowledge he has an astonishing store. Whole books have been written as to his familiarity with insect life alone (R. Patterson: The Natural History of the Insects mentioned by Shakespeare; London, 1841), and his knowledge of the characteristics of the larger animals and birds seems to be inexhaustible. Appleton Morgan, one of the commentators of the Baconian theory, adduces in The Shakespearean Myth a whole series of examples.
In Much Ado (v. 2) Benedick says to Margaret—
"Thy wit is as quick as the greyhound's mouth; it catches."
The greyhound alone among dogs can seize its prey while in full career.
In As You Like It (i. 2) Celia says—
"Here comes Monsieur Le Beau.
Rosalind. With his mouth full of news. Celia. Which he will put on us as pigeons feed their young."
Pigeons have a way, peculiar to themselves, of passing food down the throats of their young.
In Twelfth Night (iii. I) the Clown says to Viola—
"Fools are as like husbands, as pilchards are to herrings,—the
husband's the bigger."
The pilchard is a fish of the herring family, which is caught in the Channel; it is longer and has larger scales.
In the same play (ii. 5) Maria says of Malvolio—
"Here comes the trout that must be caught with tickling."
When a trout is tickled on the sides or the belly it becomes so stupefied that it lets itself be caught in the hand.
In Much Ado (iii. I) Hero says—
"For look where Beatrice, like a lapwing, runs
Close by the ground, to hear our conference."
The lapwing, which runs very swiftly, bends its neck towards the ground in running, in order to escape observation.
In King Lear (i. 4) the Fool says—
"The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long.
That it had its head bit off by its young."
In England, it is in the hedge-sparrow's nest that the cuckoo lays its eggs.
In All's Well that Ends Well (ii. 5) Lafeu says—
"I took this lark for a bunting."
The English bunting is a bird of the same colour and appearance as the lark, but it does not sing so well.
It would be easy to show that Shakespeare was as familiar with the characteristics of plants as with those of animals. Strangely enough, people have thought this knowledge of nature so improbable in a great poet, that in order to explain it they have jumped at the conclusion that the author must have been a man of science as well.
More comprehensible is the astonishment which has been awakened by Shakespeare's insight in other domains of nature not lying so open to immediate observation. His medical knowledge early attracted attention. In 1860 a Doctor Bucknill devoted a whole book to the subject, in which he goes so far as to attribute to the poet the most advanced knowledge of our own time, or, at any rate, of the 'sixties, in this department. Shakespeare's representations of madness surpass all those of other poets. Alienists are full of admiration for the accuracy of the symptoms in Lear and Ophelia. Nay, more, Shakespeare appears to have divined the more intelligent modern treatment of the insane, as opposed to the cruelty prevalent in his own time and long after. He even had some notions of what we in our days call medical jurisprudence; he was familiar with the symptoms of violent death in contradistinction to death from natural causes. Warwick says in the second part of Henry VI. (iii. 2):—
"See, how the blood is settled in his face.
Oft have I seen a timely-parted ghost,
Of ashy semblance, meagre, pale, and bloodless,
Being all descended to the labouring heart."
These lines occur in the oldest text. In the later text, undoubtedly the result of Shakespeare's revision, we read:—
"But see, his face is black, and full of blood;
His eye-balls further out than when he liv'd,
Staring full ghastly like a strangled man:
His hair uprear'd, his nostrils stretch'd with struggling;
His hands abroad display'd, as one that grasp'd
And tugg'd for life, and was by strength subdued.
Look, on the sheets, his hair, you see, is sticking;
His well-proportion'd beard made rough and rugged,
Like to the summer's corn by tempest lodg'd.
It cannot be but he was murder'd here;
The least of all these signs were probable."
Shakespeare seems, in certain instances, to be not only abreast of the natural science of his time, but in advance of it. People have had recourse to the Baconian theory in order to explain the surprising fact that although Harvey, who is commonly represented as the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, did not announce his discovery until 1619, and published his book upon it so late as 1628, yet Shakespeare, who, as we know, died in 1616, in many passages of his plays alludes to the blood as circulating through the body. Thus, for example, in Julius Cæsar (ii. I), Brutus says to Portia—
"You are my true and honourable wife;
As dear to me as are the ruddy drops
That visit my sad heart."
Again, in Coriolanus (i. I) Menenius makes the belly