Life of William Shakespeare in Stratford. Samuel Schoenbaum speculates that, "Maybe Shakespeare took Knell's place and thus found his way to London and stage-land." Shakespeare's father John, as High Bailiff of Stratford, was responsible for the acceptance and welfare of visiting theatrical troupes. However, there is no direct evidence of Shakespeare's membership of the Queen's Men, so it remains speculation. Though Shakespeare is known today primarily as a playwright and poet, his main occupation was as a player and sharer in an acting troupe. How or when Shakespeare got into acting is unknown. The profession was unregulated by a guild that could have established
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