Lawyers Shakespeare Quotes

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

If you expect me to believe that a lawyer wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream, I must be dafter than I look.

I have neither the scholar's melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician's, which is fantastical; nor the courtier's, which is proud; not the soldier's which is ambitious; nor the lawyer's, which is politic; nor the lady's, which is nice; nor the lover's, which is all these: but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in a most humorous sadness.

Reason alone fails to justify itself. Not without cause has the devil been called the prince of lawyers, and not by accident are Shakespeare’s villains good reasoners.

Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks?

The witch-burnings did not take place during the “Dark Ages,” as we commonly suppose. They occurred between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries– precisely during and following the Renaissance, that glorious period when, as we are taught, “men’s” minds were being freed from bleakness and superstition. While Michelangelo was sculpting and Shakespeare writing, the witches were burning. The whole secular “Enlightenment,” in fact, the male professions of doctor, lawyer, judge, artist, all rose from the ashes of the destroyed women’s culture. Renaissance men were celebrating naked female beauty in their art, while women’s bodies were being tortured and burned by the hundreds of thousands all around them.

The power of attaching an interest to the most trifling or painful pursuits, in which our whole attention and faculties are engaged, is one of the greatest happinesses of our nature. The common soldier mounts the breach with joy; the miser deliberately starves himself to death; the mathematician sets about extracting the cube-root with a feeling of enthusiasm; and the lawyer sheds tears of admiration over "Coke upon Littleton." It is the same through life. He who is not in some measure a pedant, though he maybe wise, cannot be a very happy man.

It was a skill useful to lawyers, and no man in all English history was more the lawyer than Coke. He personified a profession considered both so influential and so dubious that in 1372 the House of Commons had tried to bar lawyers from Parliament; little had changed when, in Coke’s lifetime, Shakespeare wrote, “First, kill all the lawyers.

This talk of laughing all the way to the bank reminds me of a delightful line from Shakespeare: The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. 2 Henry VI

There shall be no money; all shall eat and drink om my score. And I will apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree like brothers, and worship me their lord.' 'The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers!' 'Nay, that I mean to do.

I have neither the scholar’s melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician’s, which is fantastical; nor the courtier’s, which is proud; nor the soldier’s, which is ambitious; nor the lawyer’s, which is politic; nor the lady’s, which is nice; nor the lover’s, which is all these, but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness. My

All scholars, lawyers, courtiers, gentlemen They call false caterpillars and intend their death!

Law is a central tool and structure of the state. In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2, Dick the Butcher, in connection with plans for a revolt, says, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Dick sees the killing of lawyers as a way to destroy state authority (not, as is commonly thought, as a way to improve society more generally).

Over the years, scholars have imagined a Protestant Shakespeare, a secret Catholic Shakespeare, a republican Shakespeare, a monarchist Shakespeare, a heterosexual Shakespeare, a bisexual Shakespeare, a Shakespeare who hated his wife (and thus left her the second-best bed), a Shakespeare who loved his wife (and thus left her the second-best bed), a Shakespeare who, before taking up the pen, must have been a roving actor or a schoolmaster or a lawyer or a soldier or a sailor. Being nothing, Shakespeare can be anything—anything his biographers desire.

In the comedies, women often subvert the masculine order by disguising themselves as men. Portia, dressed as a lawyer, presides over Antonio’s trial, outsmarting the men in The Merchant of Venice:

In 1603, Bacon wrote a mysterious letter to a lawyer who was riding to meet the new king, James I. Bacon asked the lawyer to speak well of him to the king and defend his name “if there be any biting or nibbling at it in that place.” Then he signed off with this wish: “So desiring you to be good to concealed poets.