384 A Century of Science 



law. His allusions to the common law are often 

 very amusing, as when, in " Love's Labour 's Lost," 

 at the end of a brisk punning-match between Boyet 

 and Maria, he offers to kiss her, laughingly asking 

 for a grant of pasture on her lips, and she replies, 

 " Not so ; my lips are no common, though several 

 they be." Again, in " The Comedy of Errors," 

 " Dromio asserts that there is no time for a bald 

 man to recover his hair. This having been writ- 

 ten, the law phrase suggested itself, and he was 

 asked whether he might not do it by fine and re- 

 covery, and this suggested the efficiency of that 

 proceeding to bar heirs ; and this started the con- 

 ceit that thus the lost hair of another man would be 

 recovered." l In such quaint allusions to the com- 

 mon law and its proceedings Shakespeare abounds, 

 and we cannot help remembering that Nash, in his 

 prefatory epistle to Greene's " Menaphon," printed 

 about 1589, makes sneering mention of Shake- 

 speare as a man who had left the " trade of No ve- 

 rm t," whereunto he was born, in order to try his 

 hand at tragedy. The "trade of Noverint" was 

 a slang expression for the business of attorney; 

 and this passage has suggested that Shakespeare 

 may have spent some time hi a law office, as stu- 

 dent or as clerk, either before leaving Stratford, or 



1 Davis, The Law in Shakespeare, St. Paul, 1884. 



