ich illustrious experts of unimpeachable
competency have testified: WAS THE AUTHOR OF SHAKESPEARE'S WORKS A
LAWYER?--a lawyer deeply read and of limitless experience? I would put
aside the guesses and surmises, and perhapses, and might-have-beens,
and could-have-beens, and must-have-beens, and,

we-are-justified-in-presumings,and the rest of those vague specters
and shadows and indefintenesses, and stand or fall, win or lose, by the
verdict rendered by the jury upon that single question. If the verdict
was Yes, I should feel quite convinced that the Stratford Shakespeare,
the actor, manager, and trader who died so obscure, so forgotten, so
destitute of even village consequence, that sixty years afterward no
fellow-citizen and friend of his later days remembered to tell anything
about him, did not write the Works.

Chapter XIII of THE SHAKESPEARE PROBLEM RESTATED bears the heading
"Shakespeare as a Lawyer," and comprises some fifty pages of expert
testimony, with comments thereon, and I will copy the first nine, as
being sufficient all by themselves, as it seems to me, to settle
the question which I have conceived to be the master-key to the
Shakespeare-Bacon puzzle.

VIII

Shakespeare as a Lawyer (1)

The Plays and Poems of Shakespeare supply ample evidence that their
author not only had a very extensive and accurate knowledge of law, but
that he was well acquainted with the manners and customs of members of
the Inns of Court and with legal life generally.

"While novelists and dramatists are constantly making mistakes as to
the laws of marriage, of wills, of inheritance, to Shakespeare's law,
lavishly as he expounds it, there can neither be demurrer, nor bill of
exceptions, nor writ of error." Such was the testimony borne by one of
the most distinguished lawyers of the nineteenth century who was raised
to the high office of Lord Chief Justice in 1850, and subsequently
became Lord Chancellor. Its weight will, doubtless, be more appreciated
by lawyers than by laymen, for only lawyers know how impossible it is
for those who have not served an apprenticeship to the law to avoid
displaying their ignorance if they venture to employ legal terms and
to discuss legal doctrines. "There is nothing so dangerous," wrote Lord
Campbell, "as for one not of the craft to tamper with our freemasonry."
A layman is certain to betray himself by using some expression which a
lawyer would never employ. Mr. Sidney Lee himself suppli