Francis Carr explores the legal link
between Quixote and Shakespeare
Francis Carr explores the legal link between Quixote and Shakespeare by Francis Carr
What evidence is there that Miguel de
Cervantes wrote Don Quixote? There is no manuscript, no
letter, no diary, no will, no portrait, no marked grave, no record of
any payment, although the book became popular during his lifetime.
What do we know about Thomas Shelton, whose translation has won the
praise of literary historians ever since it appeared in England in
1612? What do we know of Cid Hamet Benengeli, the Arab historian who,
we are told, by Cervantes, is the real author? No proper attempt has
been made to place Don Quixote in the wider context of the
great plays of this period of European literature, the plays of
Shakespeare. And no-one has paid enough attention to the Shelton text
which is seldom read today.
With this absence of evidence of authorship we are on familiar
ground. There is no manuscript, no letter, no diary, no authenticated
portrait, no marked grave, no record of any payment which constitutes
proof that William Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him.
This vacuum is not the only element which Don Quixote shares
with the Shakespeare plays. The novel and the plays show a remarkable
display of legal knowledge. Both Quixote and Sancho Panza amaze their
compatriots with judicial sagacity, and, as Daniel Kornstein says in
Kill All the Lawyers, published recently by the Princeton
University Press, "Shakespeare is the greatest law school of them
all." In Measure for Measure, we have a play, he tells us,
"guaranteed to wake judges from complacency and set them worrying
about the fallible nature of human judgement."
Strangely enough, there is no evidence that either Cervantes or
Shakespeare had any legal training. If they had been to a law school
or had worked as a lawyer for even a brief period, some record of
such attendance or membership would have been written down. Even if
Shakespeare had been merely a lawyer's clerk, which some
Shakespeareans hazardously suggest, we could at least expect that
someone would have recorded that the great playwright was once
employed in a certain lawyer's chamber. The records have been
examined for such evidence, but nothing has been found. Spanish
historians have met with similar lack of success in finding anything
to suggest that Cervantes once worked in any law office. He was twice
imprisoned for commandeering wheat from land owned by the Church and
for discrepancies in his accounts as a government fodder collector.
But such contact with the law is surely insufficient for any serious
law student. A further brush with the law occurred in 1605, five
months after the publication of Don Quixote when he found
himself in gaol for a couple of days, accused of complicity in the
death of a young nobleman outside Cervantes's house in Valladolid. As
Miguel was perhaps using his house as a brothel at the time, the
police thought, without sufficient evidence, that he may have been
the murderer.
Those who believe that Shakespeare wrote the Shakespeare plays have
to accept that, as Ben Jonson stated, he "had small Latin and less
Greek." This is as hard to swallow as a claim that the portrait of
the Mona Lisa was the work of a boy of ten. Non-believers in the
Stratford claim are convinced that the author of all those plays was
a legal expert of the first order. Here the Baconians have a strong
card, one not possessed by Marlowe, Lord Oxford -- or William
Shakespeare. If Cervantes was not the author of Don Quixote --
a work unlike all the other works attributed to him, as they lack
this legal dimension -- who was the real author? There was only one
man at this time, 1605, in the whole of Europe who stands out as a
legal wizard, a polymath, for whom a case can be made for authorship
of works with another name on the title page -- Francis Bacon. Could
he have written both Don Quixote and the Shakespeare
plays?
As many as ninety quotations from the Shelton version of Don
Quixote have been found in the Shakespeare plays, or the works of
Bacon -- or both. Words are the writer's finger-prints. When a work
of genius appears in one part of Europe at the same time as plays of
equal stature in another part, a careful, unbiased literary detective
surely wonders if the same hand is responsible for both creations.
Geniuses are such rare birds on this planet, and they seldom appear
simultaneously.
Lawyers have pointed out the many Bacon-Shakespeare connections in
the plays. Mr. Justice Barton in his book, Links between
Shakespeare and the Law (1929), has told us of the proceedings
that took place in the Star Chamber involving two members of Gray's
Inn just before Twelfth Night was put on in Middle Temple Hall
in 1602. This, he considered, inspired the noisy scene in which Sir
Toby Belch and his friends cavort in Olivia's house, making fun of
Malvolio, the puritan. In the Star Chamber at the time Sir Posthumus
Hoby, the puritan, accused William Eure of disturbing the peace in
Lady Hoby's house, by playing cards and carousing. Barton also found
connections in the Shakespeare plays to cases Bacon would have known
about, such as Shelley's Case, Taltarum's Case and Chudleigh's
Case. In this last case Bacon was briefed on the second
argument.
In Mark Edwin Andrew's monograph, written in 1935 and published
thirty years later by the Colorado University Press, we can read many
pertinent comments on the similarity between Shakespeare's and
Bacon's views on equity. The author, Assistant Secretary of the
United States Navy, quotes the appointment of Bacon, then
Attorney-General, by James I to head a Commission to advise on the
Chancellor's powers in the matter of equity. Both Bacon's advice and
Shakespeare's views as expressed in The Merchant of Venice
coincide in giving the arguments of equity the victory in its
conflicts with common law. Shakespeare's views harmonized perfectly
with recognized court procedure of the time.
It is pertinent at this point to remind readers that on the
Shakespeare monument in Stratford-on-Avon church is carved IUDICIO
PLYLIUM, meaning "A Nestor in Judgement", referring to Nestor, King
and Judge of Pylus, in ancient Greece. Noting that the playwright is
here called a judge, it is interesting that, in one of the obituary
poems Written on the death of Bacon, this legal authority is praised
for his comedies and tragedies (Poem 4 in Manes Verulamiani).
In Poem 27, Bacon is also compared to Nestor.
A perfect example of judicial verdicts, in which natural justice is
upheld although in conflict with the law of the state, is found in
Chapter 22 of the first part of Don Quixote, in which our hero
finds a dozen men "strung by the neck like beads on a great iron
chain, and all manacled, a chain of galley-slaves."
"This is a case," says Quixote, "for the exercise of my profession,
for the redressing of outrages and the succouring and reliefing of
the wretched."
From NEW LAW JOURNAL January 3l, 1997
SirBacon.org - Sir Francis Bacon's New Advancement of Learning
