Since the eighteenth century, students of William Shakespeare’s plays and poems have noticed his astute use of legal terminology. In 1780, Edmond Malone, himself a barrister, suggested in his biography of Shakespeare that the Bard had technical legal training. Whether that legal knowledge derived from studying, if not practicing, law, or from his business dealings, especially buying real estate, is beyond my ability to determine. Here, what I can do is add one small bit to the vast library of musings on Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

In the 1990s, I worked in a county courthouse in south-central Pennsylvania as a deputy in the office of the Recorder of Deeds. It was steady work, often interesting, and after getting the daily bank deposit ready each morning, I spent much of the rest of the day on my feet, at the counter processing documents. As its name implies, our office was where real estate records get recorded. Along with deeds, we also recorded other documents, such as mortgages and powers of attorney. In some counties, the offices of Recorder of Deeds and Register of Wills are combined, but in our county, they are separate, so wills get filed down the hall from our office.

All those records went back to 1750, when the county was established by two sons of William Penn, Proprietors of the Commonwealth. For the first century and a half or so, county clerks copied records by hand into large canvas-covered leather-bound books, and they followed a medieval English system, so that each book had twenty-six parts or volumes. So, for example, there was Book 1 A, Book 1 B, Book 1 C, and so on.

In the December, 1957, American Heritage, Keith Kyle observed that medieval legal and political institutions that have died out in England survive in the United States. “All up and down America,” he wrote, “one comes across local government officials whose titles and duties or absence of them have more meaning to a medievalist than to a student of modern British government.” Although he did not mention it, along with those local officials went local record keeping.

In 2019, Randolph C. Head, in Making Archives in Early Modern Europe, explained how the technology of the book related to record keeping. By the Middle Ages, roughly from 500 to 1500, the primary form of recording any text was the codex, the book as we know it, with pages affixed between two covers. It had replaced the scroll, in no small part because the codex proved easier for finding one’s place.

However, as with ancient scrolls, medieval codices were written and copied by hand. Necessarily, each manuscript copy differed from another, even of the same book. For medieval and Renaissance scholars to refer to a given passage in a book, they devised divisions within the text, and that system, Head noted, worked for a range of genres, “including the Roman law books of Justinian and the works of Aristotle and Augustine.” Moreover, such textual divisions occur in the Bible, with its chapters and verses.

In Shakespeare’s day, adding verse numbers to the Bible was a new development. In 1560, four years before Shakespeare was born, the Geneva Bible was the first English translation of Scripture to use verses as well as chapters. While enumerating verses was recent, dividing the text into chapters had been going on for centuries. Most influential has been the chapter system devised in the early thirteenth century by an English priest who taught at the University of Paris, Stephen Langton. Incidentally, Langton’s name occurs in Act III of Shakespeare’s play King John. There Cardinal Pandulph arrives to confront King John about the latter’s refusal to comply with Pope Innocent III appointing Langton to be the new Archbishop of Canterbury.

As Head observed, though, these divisions within a literary or religious text need not apply to collections of legal and administrative documents. Because official records kept in bureaucratic offices were unique versions, not to be found elsewhere, scribes and clerks could develop systems for organizing information that were particular to the bookcases of codices arrayed around them. So, the keepers of medieval legal and governmental records could label a given book and number its pages.

To give an example, Head cited King Philip II of France establishing in 1204 a permanent chancery in Paris where all his records would be kept. His clerks logically began with a codex they called Register A. They soon found that documents meant for Register A overflowed the limits of that one book. As Head observed, “Register E, from the 1220s, included eighteen sections.” French legal customs influenced those in England, and the English method eventually became the number and letter arrangement I noted above.

Working with that system helped me understand an obscure line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In Act I, Scene 5, the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears to Hamlet and tells how he was murdered. As the ghost departs, he urges Hamlet to remember him.

“Remember thee?” asks Hamlet, answering, “Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat/In this distracted globe. Remember thee?/Yea, from the table of my memory/I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,/All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past/That youth and observation copied there,/And thy commandment all alone shall live/Within the book and volume of my brain/Unmixed with baser matter.”

So, to remember the ghost and his horrifying message, Hamlet will wipe clean his memory, as he would his school tablet made of slate, where he has put trivial jottings and quotations from favorite authors. Instead, his memory of his father’s ghost will be forever secure “within the book and volume of my brain.” While it may sound like Hamlet is repeating himself, he is in fact making a precise reference to public record keeping. Hamlet means that his memory of the ghost will be as carefully and permanently recorded as documents on file at a courthouse, with sturdy shelves of thick substantial books subdivided into volumes.

Whether in his lost years, or even while working in the theatre, Shakespeare studied or practiced law, he certainly knew about official record keeping. At this point, alas, it remains mere idle speculation how Shakespeare acquired his knowledge of official books and volumes. All the same, that knowledge of how government clerks kept records found its way into Hamlet, where the young prince utters what otherwise sounds like a redundancy.