Gilbert Shakespeare Gilbert Shakespeare Gilbert Shakespeare (baptised 13 October 1566, buried probably 3 February 1612) was a younger brother of William Shakespeare. His name is found in local records of Stratford-upon-Avon and London. His father, John Shakespeare, was a glover living in Henley Street, Stratford, and an alderman of the town from 1564. Gilbert may have been named after Gilbert Bradley, also a glover, who lived on the same street and who in 1565 was one of the capital burgesses of Stratford. In London Gilbert Shakespeare was a haberdasher, a seller of needlework supplies such as thread, needles, and ribbons, living in
History of the Shakespeare authorship question Shaksper argument: it is all gone for me-all up the spout. The Shaksper case is about closed." In 1891 the archivist James H. Greenstreet identified a pair of 1599 letters by the Jesuit spy George Fenner in which he reported that William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby was "busy penning plays for the common players." Greenstreet proposed Derby as the real hidden author, founding the Derbyite theory. Greenstreet's theory was revived by the American writer Robert Frazer, who argued in "The Silent Shakespeare" (1915) that the actor William Shakespeare merely commercialised the productions of more elevated authors, sometimes adapting older