seems almost to have thought in legal phrases–the commonest of legal expressions were ever at the end of his pen in description or illustration. Uestions that were raised by such skeptics as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Henry James, John Galsworthy, and Sigmund Freud still intrigue those mavericks who are persuaded that William Shakespeare is a pseudonym for an exceptionally well-educated person of noble birth who was close to the English throne. He will make mistakes he will not, and cannot, get the trade-phrasings precisely and exactly right and the moment he departs, by even a shade, from a common trade-form, the reader who has served that trade will know the writer hasn’t. man can’t handle glibly and easily and comfortably and successfully the argot of a trade at which he has not personally served. Shakespeare couldn’t have written Shakespeare’s works, for the reason that the man who wrote them was limitlessly familiar with the laws, and the law-courts, and law-proceedings, and lawyer-talk, and lawyer-ways–and if Shakespeare was possessed of the infinitely-divided star-dust that constituted this vast wealth, how did he get it, and where, and when?. 377 (January 2003) ( PDF version here) published on the SOF website (updated 2021). Originally published in the University of Miami Law Review, v. How Inheritance Law Issues in Hamlet May Shed Light on the Authorship Question Brief Chronicles & Other Past Journals Expand.
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