But such contact with the law is surely insufficient for any serious law student. A further brush with the law occurred in 1605, five months after the publication of Don Quixote when he found himself in gaol for a couple of days, accused of complicity in the death of a young nobleman outside Cervantes's house in Valladolid. As Miguel was perhaps using his house as a brothel at the time, the police thought, without sufficient evidence, that he may have been the murderer. This is as hard to swallow as a claim that the portrait of the Mona Lisa was the work of a boy of ten. Non-believers in the Stratford claim are convinced that the author of all those plays was a legal expert of the first order.
Words are the writer's finger-prints.
When a work of genius appears in one part of Europe at the same time as plays of equal stature in another part, a careful, unbiased literary detective surely wonders if the same hand is responsible for both creations. Geniuses are such rare birds on this planet, and they seldom appear simultaneously. Lawyers have pointed out the many Bacon-Shakespeare connections in the plays. This, he considered, inspired the noisy scene in which Sir Toby Belch and his friends cavort in Olivia's house, making fun of Malvolio, the puritan. In the Star Chamber at the time Sir Posthumus Hoby, the puritan, accused William Eure of disturbing the peace in Lady Hoby's house, by playing cards and carousing.