Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/250

 to their seasons, and Hastings is convinced that he was bred a bird-fancier. Each investigator discovers his own specialty in the teeming pages, and insists upon apprenticing the poet. The doctor points to the line in "Hamlet,"—

"And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee,"—

and asks, with an air of conviction, how any one at that period, who had not been bred to the profession, could have understood the ginglymoid structure of the knee! The Worshipful Master of the Bard-of-Avon Lodge claims masonic fraternity with him, thinking that allusions to masonic terms and customs are scattered through the plays, but chiefly on the strength of Hubert's words in "King John,"—

"They shake their heads, And whisper one another in the ear, And he that speaks doth grip the hearer's wrist;"

for that action is the symbol of the sublime degree! Dr. Farmer anchored his theory that Shakspeare was in his youth, and during the unaccounted-for years after he left Stratford, a sharpener and dealer in skewers, upon these lines from "Hamlet:"—

"There's a Divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will."

These skewers were of the kind then used to fasten bales of wool. But Hugh Miller, who began life as a stone-cutter, finds in those lines a clear indication that the poet was bred to be a stone-mason! And at last a practical printer by the name of Blades proves that he worked at the printer's trade; for he speaks about