J. 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.
For more on the Shakespeare Authorship Question, visit ShakespeareOxfordFellowship.org.
1 авг 2024
