John Thomas Looney (14 August 1870 – 17 January 1944) was an English school teacher who is notable for having originated the Oxfordian theory, which claims that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550–1604) was the true author of Shakespeare's plays.
Looney's book begins by outlining many of the familiar anti-Stratfordian arguments about Shakespeare of Stratford's supposedly poor education and unpoetic personality. He also criticises the methods adopted by many previous anti-Stratfordians, especially the Baconian tendency to search for ciphers. Looney considers it unlikely that an author who wished to conceal his identity would leave such messages. He then goes on to identify the influence of Frank Harris's book The Man Shakespeare, which uses the plays to find evidence of Shakespeare's beliefs and interests. Looney states that it is possible to use this method to identify the type of person who must have written the works. He considered that lower class characters were portrayed as buffoons and that the author had no sympathy for the middle-classes. He was, however, dedicated to old-fashioned feudal ideals of nobility and service. He also believed in a highly structured, dutiful and ordered society.
For Looney the plays expressed a distinct political vision that combined elements of feudalism and modern scepticism towards traditional religion. He also believed that events and characters in the plays must correspond to the life of the author. Studying the biographies of Elizabethan aristocrats, he became convinced that Edward de Vere's career and personal experience could be mapped onto the action of the plays. Since de Vere died in 1604, many years before a number of Shakespeare's works appeared, Looney argued that there is an abrupt change in publication history and in the style of plays apparently written after 1604. Unusually, Looney argued that The Tempest was not the work of Oxford/Shakespeare, but of another author. It had been mistakenly added to the canon. He argued that its style and the "dreary negativism" it promoted were inconsistent with Shakespeare's "essentially positivist" soul, and so could not have been written by Oxford. He also suggested that the evidence of other writers' hands in late plays such as Pericles, Prince of Tyre implied that the author had died, leaving them unfinished. Such works were completed and published by others, as were the sonnets, the dedication page of which implied to Looney that the author was deceased.
Looney expanded his views in later publications, especially his 1921 edition of de Vere's poetry. Looney suggested that de Vere was also responsible for some of the literary works published under the names of Arthur Golding, Anthony Munday and John Lyly.
Video Title: James Warren — J. Thomas Looney: An Unknown Fighter. Source: Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. Date Published: November 26, 2018. Description:
Thomas Looney commented on several occasions that the question of who wrote Shakespeare’s works was not the most important problem facing mankind. Those statements, combined with the record showing only three Oxfordian publications by him in the fifteen-year period after “Shakespeare” Identified was published appeared to justify the conclusion that he had indeed turned away from Oxfordian work. And yet in the past eighteen months fifteen letters that Looney wrote in 1920 and 1921 to editors of publications that had run reviews critical of his book have come to light, showing that that conclusion was not correct. These newly-discovered letters reveal him to have been intensely engaged in defending himself and his ideas from the attacks in those reviews, and in further substantiating the validity of the Oxfordian claim. He had, he wrote, “exposed himself to as severe an ordeal as any writer has been called upon to face.” It is now apparent that mild-mannered John Thomas Looney was a fighter—mild mannered on the outside, perhaps, but with a spine of steel inside. This presentation describes how he defended the Oxfordian claim, newspaper by newspaper, journal by journal, during that difficult first year.
This talk was presented on October 12, 2018, at the SOF Annual Conference in Oakland, California.
James A. Warren was a Foreign Service officer with the U.S. Department of State for more than twenty years, serving in public diplomacy positions at U.S. embassies in eight countries, mostly in Asia. He later served as Executive Director of The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST) and then as Regional Director for Southeast Asia for The Institute of International Education (IIE). He is the editor of An Index to Oxfordian Publications and the author of Summer Storm, a novel with an Oxfordian theme. He is an SOF Board member and has given presentations at several Oxfordian conferences.
