Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, and the law

The earliest biography of Bacon, written by his amanuensis and chaplain William Rawley, states that while Bacon became expert in the law, he preferred other studies in his youth:

Being returned from travel, he applied himself to the study of the common law, which he took upon him to be his profession; in which he obtained great excellency, though he made that (as himself said) but as an accessory, and not his principal study. He wrote several tractates upon that subject: wherein, though some great masters of the law did out-go him in bulk, and particularities of cases, yet in the science of the grounds and mysteries of the law he was exceeded by none. 

A letter from Bacon to his uncle Lord Burghley (William Cecil) pleads for a position that will enable him to study other things than law:

Although it must be confessed that the request is rare and unaccustomed, yet if it be observed how few there be which fall in with the study of the common laws, either being well left or friended, or at their own free election, or forsaking likely success in other studies of more delight and no less preferment, or setting hand thereunto early without waste of years.  

Poetaster (1601), a play written by Bacon’s friend Ben Jonson, portrays a character named Ovid Junior, a law student who spends his time reading poetry instead of studying law, upsetting his father:

Ovid Sr. Are these the fruits of all my travail and expenses? Is this the scope and aim of thy studies? Are these the hopeful courses wherewith I have so long flattered my expectation from thee? Verses? Poetry? Ovid, whom I thought to see the pleader [lawyer], become Ovid the play-maker?

Ovid Jr. No, sir.

Ovid Sr. Yes, sir; I hear of a tragedy of yours coming forth for the common players there, call’d Medea . . . What? shall I have my son a stager now?

Ovid Junior tells his father “I am not known upon the open stage: nor do I traffic in their theatres.” Medea is of course known for killing her own sons; this seems to be a pointed reference to Elizabeth.

The lawyer, when he reads attentively the works of William Shakespeare, may not be more surprised by the poet’s correct use of law terms, and intimate acquaintance with legal customs and tenures and the lex scripta, than by his extensive and profound knowledge of the maxims of the English law.

—William Lowes Rushton, Shakespeare’s Legal Maxims

Many writers have claimed that Shakespeare’s extensive and exact legal knowledge strongly suggests he was a lawyer; as Mark Twain put it in his book Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909):

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 . . . a man can’t handle glibly and easily and comfortably and successfully the argot of a trade at which he has not personally served.  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.

A striking feature of Shakespeare’s engagement with law, most vividly in The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure, is that it operates not merely at the level of legal vocabulary or courtroom spectacle, but at the level of professional legal reasoning. Law in these plays functions as an internally coherent system whose logic, when pressed to its limits, produces both justice and catastrophe. This is precisely the level at which Francis Bacon theorized law. In his essay “Of Judicature,” Bacon repeatedly warns against the danger that rigid legality poses when severed from judgment, cautioning judges “that that which was meant for terror be not turned into rigor,” especially when “penal laws… have been sleepers of long.” The same concern appears even more pointedly in Bacon’s private counsel to Elizabeth, where he observes that “the cessation and abstinence to execute these unnecessary laws do mortify the execution of such as are wholesome.” Law neglected, Bacon insists, does not simply lapse; it corrodes the authority of law itself.

This exact anxiety is dramatized in Measure for Measure. Vienna’s ruler confesses that “We have strict statutes and most biting laws… / Which for this fourteen years we have let slip,” only to discover that sudden enforcement produces injustice rather than order. Shakespeare gives this problem a memorable image: “In time the rod becomes more mocked than feared.” The metaphor aligns perfectly with Bacon’s diagnosis. Law unenforced becomes contemptible; law enforced without discretion becomes cruel. The danger lies not in law itself, but in the oscillation between neglect and severity, a pattern Bacon feared would “mortify” even those statutes intended for the public good.

The affinity deepens in both writers’ treatment of equity and mercy. Bacon insists that no legal system can survive without equity, invoking the maxim summum jus, summa injuria (extreme law is extreme injustice) and reminding judges that their office is jus dicere, not jus dare: “to interpret law, and not to make law.” Mercy, for Bacon, is not sentimental indulgence but a judicial virtue exercised “as far as the law permitteth,” with “a merciful eye upon the person,” even while maintaining the force of legal example. This logic governs the trial scene in The Merchant of Venice. Portia does not defeat Shylock by overriding the law with compassion; she defeats him by embracing the bond absolutely and then interpreting it more strictly than its author anticipated. Mercy is praised: “The quality of mercy is not strained,” but the verdict itself turns entirely on construction, statute, and jurisdiction. Law is not suspended; it is turned back upon itself.

Taken together, these parallels do not prove common authorship. But they do establish a shared legal imagination, one deeply shaped by Inns of Court culture, in which law is simultaneously a civilizing necessity and a perilous abstraction. In Bacon’s essays and memoranda, and in Shakespeare’s plays, the same fear recurs: that law, when either forgotten or fetishized, ceases to protect and instead becomes a machinery of forfeiture, turning words into bonds and justice into sacrifice. The question, then, is not whether Shakespeare “knew some law,” but why the plays think like law under pressure, and why that thinking so closely resembles the legal philosophy articulated by Francis Bacon. What remains is not a verdict, but a record. And records, in law as in history, have a way of speaking for themselves.

The abstrusest elements of the common law are impressed into a disciplined service with every evidence of the right and knowledge of commanding. 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, and their vouchers and double vouchers; in the procedure of the courts, the methods of bringing suits and of 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.

—Cushman K. Davis, The Law in Shakespeare