humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare

In Law Games at Gray's Inn, Isabelle
Kittson Brown writes:

That there was an earlier play of Hamlet, than
Shakespeare's remains an open question. Collier,
the forger of so many Shakespeare 'facts,'
harped much upon an older play of Hamlet.

Nashe writes in his menippean Dedication to
Greene's Menaphon:

It is a common practise . . .

Nashe is always trying to rankle the poet of the
Shakespeare works, and in keeping with the fact
that menippea are vertically constructed we have
to mine below the surface for Nashe's meaning;
sometimes a single word can stand for a whole
narrative.

Here 'common practise' could be Nashe's dig at a
particular lawyer who thought himself too good to
'practice' law in 'common' pleas on behalf of
commoner suitors in the public courts.

Common pleas is 13c., from Anglo-Fr. communs
plets; hearing civil actions by one subject
against another as opposed to pleas of the Crown.

In Francis Bacon: The First Statesman of Science
(1960), James Gerald Crowther states that 'the
young nephew and MP was already a difficult case.

In the next post I'll show how Bacon's qualification
to the Bar fits in with Nashe's subsequent statements.