des the town clerk, belonging to it,
and it is certainly not straining probability to suppose that the young
Shakespeare may have had employment in one of them. There is, it is
true, no tradition to this effect, but such traditions as we have about
Shakespeare's occupation between the time of leaving school and going
to London are so loose and baseless that no confidence can be placed
in them. It is, to say the least, more probable that he was in an
attorney's office than that he was a butcher killing calves 'in a high
style,' and making speeches over them."

This is a charming specimen of Stratfordian argument. There is, as
we have seen, a very old tradition that Shakespeare was a butcher's
apprentice. John Dowdall, who made a tour of Warwickshire in 1693,
testifies to it as coming from the old clerk who showed him over
the church, and it is unhesitatingly accepted as true by Mr.
Halliwell-Phillipps. (Vol. I, p. 11, and Vol. II, pp. 71, 72.) Mr.
Sidney Lee sees nothing improbable in it, and it is supported by Aubrey,
who must have written his account some time before 1680, when his
manuscript was completed. Of the attorney's clerk hypothesis, on the
other hand, there is not the faintest vestige of a tradition. It
has been evolved out of the fertile imaginations of embarrassed
Stratfordians, seeking for some explanation of the Stratford rustic's
marvelous acquaintance with law and legal terms and legal life. But
Mr. Churton Collins has not the least hesitation in throwing over the
tradition which has the warrant of antiquity and setting up in its
stead this ridiculous invention, for which not only is there no shred of
positive evidence, but which, as Lord Campbell and Lord Penzance pointed
out, is really put out of court by the negative evidence, since "no
young man could have been at work in an attorney's office without being
called upon continually to act as a witness, and in many other ways
leaving traces of his work and name." And as Mr. Edwards further points
out, since the day when Lord Campbell's book was published (between
forty and fifty years ago), "every old deed or will, to say nothing of
other legal papers, dated during the period of William Shakespeare's
youth, has been scrutinized over half a dozen shires, and not one
signature of the young man has been found."

Moreover, if Shakespeare had served as clerk in an attorney's office it
is clear that he must have served for a considerable period in order to