y considerable grounds for the opinion that
Shakespeare had more than a layman's acquaintance with the technical
language of the law. For it must be admitted, in the first place, that
he exhibits a remarkable acquaintance with it. That other playwrights
and poets of his day manifest a like familiarity (as we have seen
they do) precludes us, indeed, from regarding the mere occurrence of
law-terms in his works as indications of early training proper to him
alone. But they who, on the strength of the not unfrequent occurrence
of legal phrases in many of the plays and much of the poetry of the
Elizabethan period, would maintain that Shakespeare's use of them
furnishes no basis for the opinion that he acquired his knowledge of
them professionally, must also assume and support the position, that, in
the case of contemporary dramatists and poets, this use of the technical
language of conveyancing and pleading also indicates no more than an
ordinary acquaintance with it, and that, in comparing his works with
theirs in this regard, we may assume the latter to have been produced by
men who had no professional acquaintance with the law; because, if
they had such professional acquaintance with legal phraseology, its
appearance in their works as well as in Shakespeare's would manifestly
strengthen rather than invalidate the conclusion, that his familiarity
with it was acquired as they acquired theirs. This position is, to
say the least, a very difficult one to maintain, and one which any
considerate student of Elizabethan literature would be very unwilling
to assume. For our ignorance of the personal life of Shakespeare is
remarkable only because he was Shakespeare; and we know little, if any,
more about the greater number of his literary contemporaries than we do
about him. It cannot even be safely presumed, for instance, that George
Wilkins, the author of the law-besprinkled passage just above quoted
from the "Miseries of Enforced Marriage," was not a practising attorney
or barrister before or even at the time when he wrote that play. On the
contrary, it is extremely probable, nay, quite certain, that he and many
other dramatic authors of the period when he flourished, (1600-1620,)
and of the whole Elizabethan period, (1575-1625,) were nestling
attorneys or barristers before they became full-fledged dramatists.

We are not without contemporary evidence upon this point. Thomas Nash,
friend to Robert Greene, a playwright, poet, and n