Life of William Shakespeare of the career actor, rather than a member of the learned professions or from scholarly book-learning. The Shakespeare family had long sought armorial bearings and the status of gentleman. William's father John, a bailiff of Stratford with a wife of good birth, was eligible for a coat of arms and applied to the College of Heralds, but evidently his worsening financial status prevented him from obtaining it. The application was successfully renewed in 1596, most probably at the instigation of William himself as he was the more prosperous at the time. The motto "Non sanz droict" ("Not without right") was
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