author
William Lowes Rushton
1827–1909
A Victorian barrister and literary scholar, he spent decades arguing that Shakespeare showed the mind of someone trained in law. His books mix close reading, legal knowledge, and a strong fascination with how language works on the page.
1 Audiobook
Shakespeare's legal maxims
by William Lowes Rushton
About the author
Based on library and book records, William Lowes Rushton was an English barrister of Gray's Inn who wrote extensively about Shakespeare. He is especially remembered for studying the legal side of Shakespeare's writing and for arguing that the playwright had unusually deep knowledge of legal terms, customs, and maxims.
His known works include Shakespeare a Lawyer (1858), Shakespeare's Testamentary Language (1869), Shakespeare's Euphuism (1871), Shakespeare's Legal Maxims (published in Liverpool in 1907), and Shakespeare and "The Arte of English Poesie" (1909). Across these books, he combined legal training with literary criticism, trying to show how Shakespeare's phrasing, rhetoric, and technical vocabulary revealed careful learning rather than casual borrowing.
The available sources here give only a limited picture of his personal life, but they do show a long working life centered on law and Shakespeare scholarship. No suitable confirmed portrait image was found in the sources I checked.