[Is Shakespeare Dead? by Mark Twain]@TWC D-Link book
Is Shakespeare Dead?

CHAPTER VIII--Shakespeare as a Lawyer {2} 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
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Just as exactly, too; for the correctness and propriety with which these terms are introduced have compelled the admiration of a Chief Justice and a Lord Chancellor." Senator Davis wrote: "We seem to have something more than a sciolist's temerity of indulgence in the terms of an unfamiliar art.

No legal solecisms will be found.

The abstrusest elements of the common law are impressed into a disciplined service.

Over and over again, where such knowledge is unexampled in writers unlearned in the law, Shakespeare appears in perfect possession of it.

In the law of real property, its rules of tenure and descents, its entails, its fines and recoveries, their vouchers and double vouchers, in the procedure of the Courts, the method of bringing writs and arrests, the nature of actions, the rules of pleading, the law of escapes and of contempt of court, in the principles of evidence, both technical and philosophical, in the distinction between the temporal and spiritual tribunals, in the law of attainder and forfeiture, in the requisites of a valid marriage, in the presumption of legitimacy, in the learning of the law of prerogative, in the inalienable character of the Crown, this mastership appears with surprising authority." To all this testimony (and there is much more which I have not cited) may now be added that of a great lawyer of our own times, _viz._: Sir James Plaisted Wilde, Q.C.created a Baron of the Exchequer in 1860, promoted to the post of Judge-Ordinary and Judge of the Courts of Probate and Divorce in 1863, and better known to the world as Lord Penzance, to which dignity he was raised in 1869.


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