HAMLET There’s another! Why, may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities now – his quillets, his cases, his tenures and his tricks? Why does he suffer this mad knave now to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel and will not tell him of his action of battery? Hum! This fellow might be in’s time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries. To have his fine pate full of fine dirt! Will vouchers vouch him no more of his purchases and doubles than the length and breadth of a pair of indentures? The very conveyances of his lands will scarcely lie in this box, and must th’inheritor himself have no more, ha? (5.1.93-105)
Another skull, and why, may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Hamlet’s really flying now, in this grim, gleeful flight of fantasy. It might as well be a lawyer, that ready butt of bitter jokes, and where be his quiddities now, the niceties, the finer points of his arguments, his quillets, his cases, his tenures and his tricks, his quibbles and legal fictions, his cleverness and all his endless bits of paper. (Hamlet has partly got it in for his imaginary lawyer, perhaps, because he sees him as a wannabe philosopher, a pseudo-intellectual.) Why does he suffer this mad knave now to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel and will not tell him of his action of battery? Look at him, he’s just taking it, GBH with a spade by a gravedigger, and he’s not saying a word! Hum!
Or he might specialise in land law (subject to particularly egregious delays), and a landlord, a landowner himself: this fellow might be in’s time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries. (More imaginary piles of paper.) To have his fine pate full of fine dirt! (Fine, boom boom.) Will vouchers vouch him no more of his purchases and doubles than the length and breadth of a pair of indentures? All that paper, all those documents proving title; line them up (an indenture would be copied twice on a single sheet, then cut jaggardly, so that the matching of the two halves guaranteed authenticity) and they’ll barely cover a grave. (The grave becomes a version of the little patch of ground not big enough to bury the soldiers who fight for it.) The very conveyances of his lands will scarcely lie in this box—the paper trail, the legal records, they’d fill this grave and then some—and must th’inheritor himself have no more, ha? and yet this bare hole in the ground, it’s all he’s got, now.
It’s hard to overstate the centrality of the law—and endless lawsuits, and legal education, and legal paperwork—to the lives of early modern people, especially of the middling sort. The law’s delays were proverbial; the idea of lawsuits lasting for many generations was familiar long before Dickens. And so Hamlet’s meditation on mortality and the futility of human enterprise, and especially its desire to record, to document, naturally turns to the lawyer.
