Away, therefore, with tradition. But the author of the Plays and
Poems must have had a very large and a very accurate knowledge of
the law. Therefore, Shakespeare of Stratford must have been an
attorney's clerk! The method is simplicity itself. By similar
reasoning Shakespeare has been made a country schoolmaster, a
soldier, a physician, a printer, and a good many other things
beside, according to the inclination and the exigencies of the
commentator. It would not be in the least surprising to find that
he was studying Latin as a schoolmaster and law in an attorney's
office at the same time.

However, we must do Mr. Collins the justice of saying that he has
fully recognized, what is indeed tolerably obvious, that
Shakespeare must have had a sound legal training. "It may, of
course, be urged," he writes, "that Shakespeare's knowledge of
medicine, and particularly that branch of it which related to
morbid psychology, is equally remarkable, and that no one has ever
contended that he was a physician. (Here Mr. Collins is wrong;
that contention also has been put forward.) It may be urged that
his acquaintance with the technicalities of other crafts and
callings, notably of marine and military affairs, was also
extraordinary, and yet no one has suspected him of being a sailor
or a soldier. (Wrong again. Why even Messrs. Garnett and Gosse
'suspect' that he was a soldier!) This may be conceded, but the
concession hardly furnishes an analogy. To these and all other
subjects he recurs occasionally, and in season, but with
reminiscences of the law his memory, as is abundantly clear, was
simply saturated. In season and out of season now in manifest, now
in recondite application, he presses it into the service of
expression and illustration. At least a third of his myriad