William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby - Shakespearean Authorship Question

Shakespearean Authorship Question

Derby is one of several individuals who have been claimed by proponents of the Shakespearean authorship question to be the true author of William Shakespeare's works. Derby's candidacy was first proposed in 1891 by the archivist James H. Greenstreet, who identified a pair of 1599 letters by the Jesuit spy George Fenner in which he reported that Derby was not likely to advance the Catholic cause, as he was "busy penning plays for the common players." Greenstreet argued that the comic scenes in Love's Labour's Lost were influenced by a pageant of the Nine Worthies only ever performed in Derby's home town of Chester. Greenstreet attempted to develop his ideas in a second paper, but died suddenly in 1892, leaving his arguments incomplete. The theory was revived by the American writer Robert Frazer in The Silent Shakespeare (1915), who concluded that "William Stanley was William Shakespeare".

The idea was then taken up in France and was first advocated in scholarly detail when the Rabelais expert Abel Lefranc published his 1918 book Sous le masque de William Shakespeare: William Stanley, VIe comte de Derby. Lefranc added to Greenstreet's arguments, suggesting that Derby's (supposed) 1578 experiences in the Court of Navarre are reflected in the more serious portions of Love's Labour's Lost. Lefranc also noted the Stanley family's longstanding connections to the theatre. He believed that Derby may have had an affair with Mary Fitton, a candidate for the Dark Lady of the sonnets. Lefranc considered Derby to be sympathetic to France and to Catholicism, views he also believed to be present in the plays.

After Lefranc the most important champion of Derby was the physician Arthur Walsh Titherley. In his book Shakespeare's Identity he accuses Shakespeare of abusing his position as Derby's frontman by illicitly selling plays for publication and then blackmailing Derby by threatening to reveal his secret. No evidence is offered for these assertions. Titherley also published editions of sonnets and plays as Derby's work.

When not identified as the sole author of the canon, Stanley is often mentioned as a leader or participant in the "group theory" of Shakespearean authorship, according to which several individuals contributed to the works.

While accepting Shakespeare's own authorship of the canon, Leo Daugherty, who wrote an account of Stanley's life for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), has argued in a recent book that Stanley is the Fair Youth of Shakespeare's sonnets and that Barnfield is the "Rival Poet".