I disagree with many good people and count not William Shakespeare a demi-god. Rather would I think of him as a man—a toiler; a master-workman, selecting from the folio-forests the fine grained woods with which to build that matchless instrument whose melodies still sing a lullaby to our life’s regrets. Using but the best of the forest, leaving the lumber for us, the crude makers of discordant fiddles. I like to dream of him as at the Inns reading Plowden’s late Reports; gibing perhaps at the Year Books’ vile Latin, or at Littleton’s unintelligible jumble. But best of all I love that quiet midsummer’s evening when the friendly barrister from over the way drops in to chat with the master. (A sergeant, also, is sometimes there, but he is too dignified for all occasions and I never allow him to talk much at any time.) The gossip from the City to the Hall is exchanged. The barrister from over the way amusingly chronicles Sir Edward Coke’s chagrin at his late granted absolution—Sir Edward’s marriage ceremony having been irregular “evidently,” as the absolution read, “through ignorance of the law.” The twilight deepens and the young man seated apart near the window lays aside the book he has been reading. The master takes it up and idly turns the pages. Many of the triumphs and defeats there chronicled are very real ones to him. He pauses a moment at Lady Hales’ case. The funereal rows of black type awaken memories of his first days at Westminster, when with lips apart he stared at the six sergeants—two for the Lady and four for the Crown—as they delivered their intricate arguments. As the master ends his solemn recital of the Lady’s struggle for her own, the youngster near the window laughs. And we to this day laugh with him when we hear the case retried by poor mad Ophelia’s grave-diggers.

Sir James Hales, the son of a Baron of the Exchequer, was a Justice of the Common Pleas, a suicide and ergo, a felon. For, “while walking through divers streets and highways of Cambridge, he did wantonly enter a ditch flowing there-through and himself therein feloniously and voluntarily drowned.” In those days of simple justice such an atrocious crime was, though falling perhaps a little short of rank burglary, at least felony without benefit of clergy. This same spirit of simple justice not only denied him christian burial but also escheated his goods and chattels to the Crown, leaving his guilty widow, guilty through her marriage to such an atrocious criminal, penniless. In 1550, Lady Hales caused an action of trespass to be brought against one Petit, a lessee holding under the Crown, claiming that Sir James’ alleged crime was not consummate until after his death and “the dead can do no wrong.”

“The death precedes the forfeiture,” argued the widow’s learned council, “for until the death is fully consummate he is not a felon; for if he had killed another he should not have been a felon until the other had been dead and for the same reason he cannot be a felon until the death of himself be fully had and consummate.”

The sergeants for the Crown insisted that the crime lay in the act done in the life-time which was the cause of the death. “The act consists of three parts: the imagination, the resolution and the perfection. The death is only a sequel to the act.”

“It must be ‘se offendendo;’ it cannot be else. For here lies the point; if I drown myself wittingly, it argues an act: and an act hath three branches, it is, to act, to do, and to perform: argal, she drowned herself wittingly.”

Sir Anthony Brown, in delivering the judgment of the Court, said: “Sir James Hales is dead; and how came he to his death? It may be answered, By drowning. And who drowned him? Sir James Hales. And when did he drown him? In his life-time. So that Sir James Hales, being alive, caused Sir James Hales to die, and the act of the living man was the death of the dead man.”

“If the man go to this water, and drown himself, it is, will he, nill he, he goes—mark you that; but if the water come to him and drown him, he drowns not himself; argal, he that is not guilty of his own death shortens not his own life.”

“But is this law?”

“Ay, marry, is’t! crowner’s quest law.”

Preston Kendall.