J. Thomas Looney, who created the alternative Oxfordian theory, was convinced that his candidate, the Earl of Oxford, would never have written The Tempest.
While accepting Shakespeare's own authorship of the canon, Leo Daugherty, who wrote Stanley's life for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), has argued in a recent book that Stanley is the Fair Youth of Shakespeare's sonnets and that Barnfield is the "Rival Poet" [REF].