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Myers Literary Guide:
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The North-East
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JOHN THOMAS LOONEY (1870 - 1944) John Thomas Looney, mercifully pronounced ‘Loney’ is listed in Ward’s Directory for 1899-1900 as a teacher living at 119 Rodsley Avenue, Gateshead. He later resided at 15 Laburnum Gardens, Low Fell. He shared none of the snobbish assumptions of other researchers, but close attention to the Shakespeare texts he taught had convinced him that the Stratfordian identification was in error. In 1920, he published through Cecil Palmer in London a monumental work whose short title is Shakespeare Identified. Looney, who resisted his publisher’s suggestion that he use a pseudonym, suggests that the real author of Shakespeare’s plays was Edmund de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who fitted Looney’s deductions that Shakespeare was, among much else, a nobleman of Lancastrian sympathies, with a fondness for Italy and a leaning towards Catholicism. Looney’s book started a whole new avenue of speculation, and has many followers today. Vigo Demant (q.v.) was one of these. Sigmund Freud read it in 1923 and was at once converted. Even at the end of his life, in 1939, Freud repeats his view in the final revision of An Outline of Psychoanalysis. Looney researched his work in the Newcastle Lit and Phil, of which he was a member after 1911 and pays handsome tribute to the library; its unique system of operation, he says, ‘ensured an ease and rapidity of work which would be impossible in any other institution in the country’. Looney presented the Lit and Phil with his edition of Edmund de Vere’s poems in December 1927.
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