Warren to publish centennial book in 2020

James A. Warren at work on J. Thomas Looney’s

Shakespeare Identified: The 100th Anniversary of the Book that is Revolutionizing Shakespeare Studies

in his Cary, NC office, February 27, 2020

Researcher James A. Warren told us that he hopes to publish J. Thomas Looney’s Shakespeare Identified: The 100th Anniversary of the Book that is Revolutionizing Shakespeare Studies by the end of this 2020 centennial year.

On February 6, 2020, Warren reported:

"I have just finished the first draft of the SI book, after 93 consecutive 12-hour days. I need to do more research, though, and now expect to finish the book near the end of this year."

Warren became interested in public response to Looney’s identification of Shakespeare as Edward DeVere, seventeenth earl of Oxford, while producing his own 2012 An Index to Oxfordian Publications, currently in its fourth edition (Forever Press, 2017).

Warren’s list of Shakespeare Identified reviews and articles published under the heading “Looney Reading List” in An Index became the foundation of an intense period of research and publishing that has revealed a massive amount of primary material about Looney’s life and the aftermath of the publication of Shakespeare Identified.

In 2015, Warren joined the Shakespeare Identified Centennial Committee created by the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship in anticipation of the the 2020 centennial of Looney’s book. As his contribution to the celebration, Warren produced a new edition of Looney’s work titled Shakespeare Identified by J. Thomas Looney: Centenary Edition published by his own imprint Veritas Publications in 2019.

Also in 2019, Warren published a culmination of the original “Looney Reading List” as Shakespeare Revealed: the Collected Articles and Published Letters of J. Thomas Looney — annotated letters, reviews, and articles from the period following Shakespeare Identified publication in 1920 through 1941.

Biographical material on Looney that Warren initially intended to include in this year’s J. Thomas Looney’s Shakespeare Identified will be published in a subsequent book tentatively titled, The Worlds of J. Thomas Looney: The Biography of a Most Unusual Man.

Warren said:

"Most of the material on Looney personally will now be in the biography of him that I'll write after I finish my book on his book and the effect it has had on the world, and after I publish an annotated collection of Oxfordian letters. I have more than 400 letters that the first generations of Oxfordians sent among themselves, and hope to find many more in next year."

That book of Oxfordian letters to be titled Shakespeare Investigated:

The Oxfordian Correspondence of J. Thomas Looney together with that of other early Oxfordians 1920-1945 is also planned for publication in 2020.

Warren also intends to publish a book now in progress under the working title of Shakespeare Explained that will contain the Circulars of the original, UK-based Shakespeare Fellowship, columns from the Hackney Spectator, the Oxfordian pages in the Shakespeare Pictorial, and the Oxfordian “Shakespeare Page” in the East Anglian Magazine.

Warren uncovered much of his material during four research trips to England that were partially supported by research grants from the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. He chronicled some of these explorations in videos of 2018 and 2019 SOF conference presentations available on the SOF YouTube channel. (See links below.)

James A. Warren will be a featured speaker at the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship’s Shakespeare Identified Centennial symposium at the National Press Club on March 4, 2020.