NOTE III.
[I. 3. 16.] Theobald substitutes ‘Stanley’ for ‘Derby’ throughout, observing, ‘This is a blunder of inadvertence, which has run thro’ the whole chain of impressions. It could not well be original in Shakespeare, who was most minutely acquainted with his history and the intermarriages of the nobility...Thomas Lord Stanley was not created Earl of Derby till after the accession of that prince (i.e. Henry VII.); and, accordingly, afterwards in the fourth and fifth Acts of this play, before the battel of Bosworth-field, he is every where call’d Lord Stanley. This sufficiently justifies the change I have made in his title.’
This statement is not quite correct. He is called ‘Derby’ (the word being, of course, variously spelt) throughout the first and second Acts. He is called ‘Lord Stanley’ for the first time in Act III. Scene 2. In Act III. Scene 4 he is called ‘Derby’ in the stage directions and ‘Stanley’ in the text. He is ‘Stanley’ in Act IV. Scene 1. In Act IV. Scenes 2 and 3, we find in the Folio ‘Stanley’ both in the stage directions and the text. In the Quarto it is ‘Derby,’ in the stage directions, the name not occurring in the text. In Act IV. Scene 4, he is called ‘Derby’ in the stage directions. In Act V. Scene 2, Richmond speaks of him as ‘my father Stanley,’ and in the next scene he is called ‘Derby’ in the stage directions, and ‘Stanley’ in the text.
The error must have been due to the author, who would not have written ‘my lord of Stanley,’ and therefore we have retained ‘Derby’ wherever both Quarto and Folio agree in reading it. ‘An editor,’ says Mr Grant White, ‘is not justifiable in substituting what his author should have written for what he did write.’