Mainly about William Stanley and other authorship candidates
He was proposed as an
alternative authorship candidate in 1918 by a French Professor and with good
reason, as it is impossible not to associate him and his brother Ferdinando
closely with Love's Labour's Lost.
Then there are all the Stanleys and Lancastrians with enhanced or gratuitous
roles in his early King plays. Stanley also wrote plays and had a troupe of
players. A good recent summary of these and other connections is in Michell. My findings are mainly in
establishing that he really was the 'great traveller' of ballad and legend, and
his ancestry and biography presents so many parallels and contacts with people
in Shakespeare's circle that it becomes difficult to dismiss him to the
sidelines. Professor Daugherty, his recent biographer (see Dictionary
of National Biography), is convinced they were closely involved and
that Stanley had Catholic sympathies. I agree. One comment by my husband
several years ago was, "The answer to all of your questions is 'The Earl
of Derby'." This is not quite true, but perhaps illustrates that they
obviously played a central role in my research - and in Shakespeare's
biography. One of the first comments from Professor Daugherty, after
establishing contact was, "Do you realise, Helen, that we are the only two
people in the world interested in William Stanley?" I replied, "I can
double that." Meanwhile I can triple this number, and predict that many
more will become interested in him.
I doubt it, but he might have
provided an embryo version of Love's
Labour's Lost, suggestions for the content of other early plays, and
knowledge and stories that he brought back from his travels.
Forget them, other than as
'extras' on the sidelines. The other two main earl candidates, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford
and Roger Manners, 5th Earl of
Rutland, were both closely related to William Stanley
(and the latter closely related to the Cheshire Ardernes), so Shakespeare would
have known them well enough to pick up ideas from them, too. The only reason
any alternative candidates were offered in the first place was because some
people could not reconcile the 'son of an illiterate wool-dealer' in a small
market-town in the Midlands with the genius and knowledge of Shakespeare. I
sympathise with these doubts because the 'conventional' biography does present
so many anomalies, but the answers don't lie in alternative authorship
candidates. Many of these anomalies are now explained by his parents and their
religious leanings, which led to his upbringing in upper gentry and aristocratic
circles.
As mentioned, he and his
associates, particularly the Earls of Derby, kept popping up all over the place
in my Lancashire research. Almost by chance I visited Hoghton
Tower in August 1999, alerted by announcements about the recent
Shakespeare conference there and at Lancaster
University. I bought the books on sale, read them (starting with Honigmann, 1985), and immediately realised
I already had the answers to many questions and puzzles in the 'Shakespeare in
Lancashire' episode, although many puzzles still remained. These remaining
puzzles continued to haunt me and still haunt me today, but I have hopes that
they might be resolved in the next few years.