August 19, 2019
I first learned of the name Edward de Vere in November 2002, in an issue of The Great Ideas Online, the weekly publication of the Center for the Study of the Great Ideas, of which I had become a member only one month earlier. Max Weismann, who founded the Center with Mortimer J. Adler, used the weekly publication to disseminate articles of interest to the Center’s members.
That issue in the middle of November included several pieces under the general heading “The Great Shakespeare Hoax,” including an introduction by Max, an article by Roland G. Caldwell describing the Second Annual Authorship Studies Conference at Concordia University, and a letter Mortimer Adler wrote to Max in 1997 to document Adler’s belief that Edward de Vere (17th Earl of Oxford) had authored “Shakespeare’s” poems and dramas and to “highly recommend” a reading of J. Thomas Looney’s “Shakespeare” Identified (1920).
My initial, visceral, response to the publication, before reading any of it, was anger. I wondered what kind of crackpot organization I had just joined. Why is Max wasting my time with this nonsense? Decades earlier I had considered the idea of Bacon as Shakespeare and rejected it, and ever since had ignored the issue and Shakespeare doubters on the rare occasions when I chanced to hear of them.
So I set about reading, grudgingly, the pieces Max had included in the publication and found, to my surprise after I got over my initial anger, that Caldwell’s description of Roger Stritmatter’s presentation on the Geneva Bible, and the reasons Adler cited for his belief in Oxford’s authorship, were too substantive to ignore, as unsettling as they were. As I was living in Vientiane, Laos, at the time, books on the authorship question were not readily available in local bookstores, so I ordered several from Amazon.com. The first to arrive was Richard F. Whalen’s Shakespeare: Who Was He? (1994), which convinced me that Oxford probably had written Shakespeare’s works. A month later I got and read Ruth Loyd Miller’s 1975 edition of J. Thomas Looney’s “Shakespeare” Identified,” which I found thrilling and thoroughly convincing. And Charlton Ogburn’s The Mysterious William Shakespeare (1984, rev. 1992), which I received a month later, in February 2003, answered the questions and settled the doubts I still had.
Several times over the sixteen years that I have been an Oxfordian, I have re-examined all aspects of the question, trying to build the case for Oxford’s authorship again from the ground up, to be sure it rests on a solid foundation. And each time I become more convinced that Looney, Ogburn, Whalen, and so many others got the story right.
— James A. Warren
Editorial Note: Warren was honored in 2020 as Oxfordian of the Year. In 2018 he brought the foundational work of the Oxfordian movement — J. Thomas Looney’s “Shakespeare” Identified — back to life with a new scholarly annotated edition. Warren is also the editor of “Shakespeare” Revealed, a collection of Looney’s articles and published letters in defense of his revolutionary theory. He has compiled the mammoth Index to Oxfordian Publications, now in its fourth edition (2017), and in 2019 resurrected a charming small work, Shakespearian Fantasias, written in the 1920s by journalist and early Oxfordian Esther Singleton. Henry Folger, founder of the Folger Shakespeare Library, was deeply fascinated by Singleton’s Oxfordian-influenced book. Warren is also the author of Summer Storm: A Novel of Ideas (2016), in which a professor and his students wrestle with how we know what we know regarding the authorship of Shakespeare’s works. On March 4, 2020, he was the keynote speaker at the SOF celebration of the centennial of Looney’s 1920 book. Most recently, during 2021, Warren has published Shakespeare Revolutionized (a landmark history of the Oxfordian movement and the impact of Looney’s book) and Shakespeare Investigated (a massive collection of articles published by the Shakespeare Fellowship during 1922–36, most of which have been unavailable and out of print since that time).
“How I Became an Oxfordian” is a series edited by Bob Meyers. You may submit your essay on this topic (500 words or less in an editable format such as MS Word), along with a digital photo of yourself, to: communications@shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org. Also include a sentence about yourself, e.g.: “John J. Smith is a businessman in San Francisco.” You must be an SOF member to submit an essay.
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[published Aug. 19, 2019; updated 2021]
