"Shakespeare" Revealed: The Collected Articles and Published Letters of J. Thomas Looney

Although best known for “Shakespeare” Identified, the book in which he introduced, in 1920, the idea that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, was the pen behind the pseudonym “William Shakespeare,” J. Thomas Looney also wrote dozens of shorter pieces—fifty-three, all told—on the Shakespeare authorship question. Only a handful of these pieces have ever been reprinted, and, in fact, only eleven of them were even known of in the middle of 2017. This book brings all of them—articles and published letters, “old” and newly-discovered—together for the first time. During the decades when the bulk of Looney’s shorter pieces were long forgotten, it was thought that he had largely turned away from the Oxfordian movement after publishing “Shakespeare” Identified. Only with the recent discovery of forty-two “new” articles and letters and their reprinting in this book has it become clear just how intensely Looney defended his ideas and continued to work to substantiate the validity of the Oxfordian claim —the claim that “Shakespeare” had indeed been Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford—after the publication of “Shakespeare” Identified.