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A Discussion With Jennifer Lee Carrell (Continued...)

Having invested so much time and research in Shakespearean conspiracy theories in order to lay the groundwork for Interred with Their Bones, is there any particular theory that you think might actually hold water? If so, why?

On the question of Shakespeare's identity, I'd say that I'm happily agnostic: I like the mystery. The writer of the plays was probably William Shakespeare of Stratford, but there are enough gaps in the evidence that it only seems responsible to admit that we don't know "who did it" with certainty. To put it in legal terms, by the standards of a civil trial ("preponderance of evidence"), I would cast my vote to convict the actor from Stratford. By the much more demanding standards of a criminal trial, however ("beyond a reasonable doubt"), I could not, because to my mind somebody else might well be the guilty party.

That said, most of the commonly proposed alternates have serious problems. For example, Edward de Vere, the seventeenth earl of Oxford, died in 1604—although new Shakespearean plays look to have gone on premiering until about 1613.

The alternate who most intrigues me at the moment is William Stanley, sixth earl of Derby. Unlike Oxford, he had the right life span, which makes Derby possible as a candidate. But he's also seductively plausible.

Derby is known, for instance, to have written plays (though none survive), and he was a fine musician (at least one of his compositions, a pavane, does survive). He also knew all the right things: He was well educated (including a stint of legal training at the Inns of Court) and widely traveled, and seems to have enjoyed such aristocratic pastimes as hunting and hawking (he certainly indulged in them). His family was (and is) famous for horsemanship, horse breeding, and horse racing (from their title comes the noun derby, meaning "horse race"). He grew up in a household widely acknowledged to be England's grandest, outside the queen's. Theater was literally in the house—his father and elder brother, Lord Strange, were two of the theater's greatest patrons. Both the Earl of Derby's Men and Lord Strange's Men seem to have performed some of Shakespeare's earliest plays, before he became the queen's playwright (as part of the Chamberlain's Men—essentially the queen's company).

From infancy, Derby knew court, courtiers, grand living, and political infighting, but he never expected to be a peer himself—he was a younger son. In fact, he seems to have been something of a wild child for much of his youth, pulling himself back to the straight and narrow only when his elder brother died unexpectedly in 1594, leaving him the burden of one of England's most powerful earldoms.

He seems to have been properly Church of England, at least on the surface, but he grew up in Lancashire, a stronghold of Roman Catholicism and of Catholic discontent—at a time when that roused suspicions of treason. His father routinely shielded Catholics from the full brunt of the increasingly ferocious laws aimed at crushing them—while managing to keep the queen's trust. So Derby grew up surrounded by Catholic sensibilities (as well as a sense of protective duplicity), familiar—as was the writer of the plays—with such notions as confession and purgatory, with figures of friars and nuns, and with the folklore of ghosts and fairies that seems to have survived much longer in the conservative Catholic countryside than in urban Puritan neighborhoods.

Through their mother, Derby and his brother had royal blood—they were great-great-grandsons of King Henry VII through his daughter Mary Tudor (King Henry VIII's younger sister and Queen Elizabeth's aunt). Both brothers thus spent their lives aware of being carefully, even anxiously watched by the government, by would-be Catholic plotters, and by all those with a dangerous taste for speculating on who might succeed Queen Elizabeth. (For a sense of how solid his royal claim seemed at the time, the man who eventually became Elizabeth's heir, King James, also claimed the English throne by virtue of being the great-great-grandson of King Henry VII—through the elder daughter, Margaret. Though Derby's claim came through the younger daughter, he was preferred to James in some quarters because he was English, while James, as King of Scotland, was a foreigner.) Derby was, for all that, one of the Queen's few male relations on the royal Tudor side to survive into old age without losing his head or even doing a stint in the Tower. That in itself suggests a man of no mean political and diplomatic savvy, as well as an insider's understanding of the lures and perils of great power.

If there is a quintessentially Shakespearean topic, it is surely the tangled and twisting lures, responsibilities, and perils of power.

Derby has links to specific plays as well. The Stanleys had helped to put King Henry VII on throne, at the end of the Wars of the Roses, and Shakespeare's history plays highlight the role of the house of Stanley. Derby also has intriguing links to Love's Labour's Lost and The Tempest. His turbulent relationship with his wife, Elizabeth de Vere (eldest daughter of the earl of Oxford)—which seems to have included meddling deceit on the part of a trusted lieutenant—bears at least a passing resemblance to the plot of Othello.

Derby's status—first as the cadet of a major aristocratic dynasty, and later as the earl of Derby and head of the family—would explain why, if indeed he had a hand in composing Shakespeare's plays, he hid his identity behind a pseudonym. Writing for the public stage would have been almost immeasurably beneath his family's dignity. On the other hand, his exalted status would explain why Shakespeare seems to have waltzed unscathed through crises and scandals that would have landed other playwrights in scalding water—such as the playing of Richard II, with its touchy subject of deposing a monarch, on the eve of the Essex rebellion.

Given all of the circumstantial evidence, I have no idea why Derby has always been such a dark horse candidate. But he's never had the cachet of Bacon or Oxford or even Marlowe. Perhaps it's because he didn't leave a body of writing behind—though to my mind, that's perversely in his favor, since to my ears the writings of Bacon, Oxford, and Marlowe don't sound anything like Shakespeare's work.

Unfortunately, the Derby seat of Lathom House, for centuries one of England's largest and finest castles, was razed to the ground by Cromwell's army during the Civil War, with such savage finality that it no longer seems to be quite clear exactly where it stood. Any papers that might have clarified Derby's relationship to a certain player from Stratford were likely burned then (just a few years after Derby's death), if they had not already been destroyed. The other main palace of the earls of Derby, Knowsley Hall, still exists as one of the great stately homes of England—but since the sixth earl's time it has been rebuilt, enlarged, and refurbished out of all recognition. However suggestive Derby's life, learning, and character may be, real links between him and Shakespeare remain elusive; the closer you look, the more they dissolve, like the remnants of a dream.

In the end, the lack of irrefutable evidence linking anyone—including the front-runner William Shakespeare of Stratford—to the writing of the plays keeps me in the agnostic category. It's still a mystery, and I like it that way.

But history is full of quirks. It's always possible that something has survived and will eventually come to light.

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