J. Thomas Looney - Reception and Assessments

Reception and Assessments

Looney's book started a whole new avenue of speculation, and has many followers today. In general, alternative authorship theories are dismissed by the great majority of English professors and Shakespeare scholars, who accept the traditional attribution to Shakespeare of Stratford.

Early reviewers were less than kind. The reviewer for The Outlook dismissed the book after reading but a few chapters, writing that it appeared "to have all the paraphernalia of scholarship but little of its critical spirit" with "sweeping suppositions" based on little evidence.

The The Times Literary Supplement reviewer praised the author for his honesty in admitting to his ignorance of Early Modern poetry and drama, to which he attributes Looney’s methods and conclusions. He writes that Looney’s arguments for Oxford are much more strained and incredulous than those for Shakespeare, and also points out some glaring lapses of logic. About Looney’s declaration that The Tempest was not written by the same author as the rest of the Shakespearean canon, he writes:

Having begun, on the usual "Baconian" lines, by insisting that "there was subterfuge in the manner of publishing the First Folio edition"—which implies, if it implies anything, that the publishers were aware of the true authorship—he ends by maintaining that the play to which they assigned the place of honour was by someone else. To be suspicious about gnats and swallow camels seems the inevitable beginning and end of all these identifications of Shakespeare; but Mr. Looney exemplifies the process with a frankness all his own.

According to Steven May, who produced the standard edition of Edward de Vere's poetry, "he motifs and stylistic traits that Looney and his followers have claimed through the years to be unique to the verse of both the Earl of Oxford and Shakespeare are in fact commonplaces of Elizabethan poetry employed by many other contemporary writers. The Oxfordians have failed to establish any meaningful connection between Oxford's verse and Shakespeare's. Stripped of this argument, the Earl is no more likely to have written Shakespeare's works than any other Elizabethan poet."

By contrast, Oxfordians Warren Hope and Kim Holston, in recounting Looney's methodology, say that "aving found someone who met all the conditions he had originally established, Looney devotes a chapter to a comparison of Oxford's verse with the early work of Shakespeare, a tour de force of literary and historical analysis which in some ways anticipates the procedures of the 'new criticism.'"

David Chandler notes that Looney’s psychological method of discovering the true author was more congruent to the traditions of Romantic criticism as exemplified by Edward Dowden's Shakspere (1875), his attempt to discover the personality of the author by gleaning clues from the works.

Oxfordianism, from the start, assumed something similar.… In the cultural situation of the early twentieth century, Looney is quite understandable. He took the case against the Stratford man, put forward by the Baconians and widely accepted, and combined its conclusions with the post-Dowden desire to read the plays as representing an intimate, credible, psycho-drama.

He goes on to say that Oxfordism’s principles—late expressions of the prevailing critical fashions of their times—were outdated by changing critical scholarship, and that Oxfordians must find some other way to relate to contemporary scholarship if they expect the theory to be taken seriously outside of Oxfordian circles.

Oxfordianism's premises were soon challenged by the emergence of "impersonal" and formalist criticisms. … Looney's theoretical assumptions were … becoming obsolete in 1920, and the following half century saw a more and more determined turn away from biographical criticism …. work, indeed, seems to have paid no attention to changes in the academic approach to Shakespeare (and other English literature) since 1920. … By contrast, a reiterated claim of Oxfordian literature has been that the case is already, unarguably, complete. … this is akin to the claims made for religious texts…. Reading Oxfordian scholarship one often encounters a slippery area in which it is unclear whether Oxford's authorship of the plays is being argued for, or simply assumed.

... Looney's conclusions cannot be proved true, and believing them requires some degree of "faith." Put more simply, Looney made an argument, however much some might like to believe that he merely announced a discovery. … That argument needs to be updated, if it is to stimulate serious academic interest … The biographical approach to literature now needs to be theoretically justified before many of the claims for De Vere's authorship of the plays are pressed further. Oxfordians have so far shown an unfortunate reluctance to question how much they work with post-"Romantic" assumptions about authorship. … they need to show that such ideas enjoyed a currency in the late sixteenth century before devoting much attention to the specific case for alleged relationship between De Vere and the Shakespearean corpus. If this is not possible … then at least a much broader case needs to be constructed for the autobiographical nature of dramatic writing at that time.