The 6th Earl of Derby's Touring Players

In May 1594, a new company of players appeared in the southern English provinces. Identified on the tour as Derby's Men, this troupe should be distinguished from the starry company patronized by Ferdinando Stanley, the 5th Earl of Derby, who had just died suddenly the previous month, under mysterious—and still controversial—circumstances. The leading actors in the 5th Earl's company were already in the process of reconstituting themselves under a new patron, Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain; they were destined to achieve enduring fame as the company of Shakespeare (see further, Manley and MacLean 322–25; Daugherty "Assassination").

Others have suggested that the new Derby troupe was simply a "remnant" of the previous Earl's company (see e.g. Gurr 265; Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 126–27). In the circumstances arising from Ferdinando's unexpected and premature death, this seems unlikely. To quote from Lord Strange's Men and Their Plays:

The animosity that existed between William Stanley and his brother's widow has been well documented through the bitter legal maneuvering and disputes that began even before Ferdinando's death and lasted for over a decade. Ferdinando's will stipulated that his estates were not to be divided but that they should pass intact to his widow for life and then to his eldest daughter Anne. Not surprisingly, as legitimate male heir to the earldom, William challenged his brother's wishes and a series of lawsuits ensued, with only a partial out-of-court settlement achieved by March 1595. In the midst of this immediate, very personal conflict, it is improbable that leading members of Ferdinando's company would have made an easy migration to the patronage of the brother whom he and his wife apparently held in some disdain (Manley and MacLean 326).

We know less about the new Derby's Men, though their patron was certainly William, younger brother of Ferdinando Stanley. William Stanley (bap.1561–d.1642) had spent much of the previous decade travelling on the continent, returning home in August 1587 to rejoin his family and divide his time between their estates and residences in Lancashire and London. In 1592 he was made governor of the Isle of Man (see further, Daugherty ODNB). Upon his brother's death he assumed the title of 6th Earl in mid-April 1594, only a month before his troupe was recorded at Southampton together with Lord Morley's players, most likely allowed to use the hall at the Bargate as their venue for the required performance before the mayor and council.¹ The sharing of the £1 performance reward with another company is an interesting detail, not always reliably recorded in provincial civic records. Morley's and Derby's Men show up together several months later in East Anglia at King's Lynn as well, so we may wonder whether other appearances at Ipswich and Norwich during the same calendar year might have been this same group of actors, temporarily joined in order to launch the fledgling troupe under Derby's patronage.² Edward Parker, Lord Morley, was William Stanley's cousin and a Lancashire neighbor at Hornby Castle. His troupe had experience in touring the provinces dating back to the 1580s, much of the time in the south, so perhaps William's immediate desire to begin formation of an acting troupe was spurred on by the expansion of cast members offered by the seasoned players in Morley's troupe.³

William Stanley was an enthusiastic heir to his family's long tradition of theatrical patronage (see further, MacLean, "Tradition" 205–26; more recently Manley and MacLean 12–36). Perhaps he was the most zealous of them all: his acting troupe first appears in the provincial records just after his succession to the title in 1594 until 5 February 1637, when they can still be traced at Doncaster in the West Riding of Yorkshire (Doncaster Chamberlain's Account, Doncaster Archives: AB6/2/163, p. 17, cited in Palmer 303). The rapid formation of this touring troupe under his patronage was probably motivated by several factors: family tradition, a...