William Lowes Rushton

Born in the late 1820s and dying in 1909, William Lowes Rushton was a Liverpool-based barrister, admitted at Gray's Inn and later called to the bar. He was the son of Edward Rushton, a stipendiary magistrate of Liverpool, and he belonged to the Northern Circuit.

Rushton is remembered chiefly for a long run of Shakespeare studies. His first book, Shakespeare a Lawyer, appeared in 1858 and helped make the case that Shakespeare had serious legal knowledge. He continued that line of thought in later works including Shakespeare's Testamentary Language and Shakespeare's Legal Maxims, while also writing Shakespeare's Euphuism and Shakespeare Illustrated by Old Authors.

His work sits at an interesting crossroads between law and literature: practical legal training on one side, close reading and literary detective work on the other. Even when later scholars disagreed with some of his conclusions, his books remained part of the long conversation about how Shakespeare wrote and what kinds of learning may have shaped the plays.