The Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship has named retired diplomat and independent researcher James A. Warren the Oxfordian of the Year for 2020. Warren is the editor of the centenary scholarly edition of J. Thomas Looney’s landmark book, “Shakespeare” Identified in Edward de Vere the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, and the first collection of Looney’s articles and letters.
Past recipients of the award, now in its 16th year — the highest honor conferred by the SOF — include Justice John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Cheryl Eagan-Donovan, the 2019 Oxfordian of the Year and chair of this year’s selection committee, announced the award during the SOF online Shakespeare Authorship Symposium on Saturday, October 3, 2020. A complete list of past recipients is available here.
Expressing the sentiments of the entire selection committee, and many SOF members who wrote to the committee, Eagan-Donovan quoted 2014 honoree McNeil: “In this centennial year of the Oxfordian movement, it’s especially important for us to know our own history. Jim Warren has done more than anyone in finding and collecting documents that shed new light on J. Thomas Looney and his triumphs and struggles.” She also quoted 2018 honoree Leon, who hailed the “intensive, multi-year effort on Jim’s part, one that kept growing bigger as his research revealed more documents to be studied, analyzed, and incorporated into his opus … a magnificent accomplishment that is a worthy thank you to Looney.”
Warren’s work has been partly supported by SOF research grants, but he has pursued it mostly at his own expense, including numerous journeys to libraries and archives in the United Kingdom.
Jim has recounted how he became an Oxfordian. He recalls first hearing about Edward de Vere in 2002 in The Great Ideas Online, a weekly publication of the Center for the Study of the Great Ideas, which he had recently joined and of which he is now a Fellow. He was initially “angered” by the “crackpot” idea that Oxford might be the author of the works of Shakespeare, which struck him as “nonsense.” But as he read more about it, he became unsettled, then fascinated, then thrilled, and finally thoroughly convinced by the case for Oxford.
On March 4, 2020, Jim was the keynote speaker at the SOF symposium in Washington, D.C., celebrating the centennial of Looney’s revolutionary book. His lecture discussed how Looney’s insights have changed our understanding of the author “Shakespeare,” his plays and poems, the Elizabethan theatre and era, and the nature of genius and literary creativity. He also provided tantalizing glimpses of Looney himself — a brilliant, independent-minded, yet modest scholar.
During the recent online symposium of October 2–3, Warren further explored Looney’s uniquely “difficult task” in seeking to overturn the long-established traditional belief about Shakespeare authorship, which had by then attained (and still has) the status of a dominant mythology. He is now finalizing a major biographical study of Looney and his importance to Shakespearean studies.
Warren was a Foreign Service officer for more than 20 years at eight U.S. embassies. He also served as executive director of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, and regional director for Southeast Asia for the Institute of International Education. He was a member of the SOF Board of Trustees from 2015 to 2018.
In addition to his research and writing on J. Thomas Looney, Warren has edited and published an invaluable general reference work, An Index to Oxfordian Publications, of which the 4th edition appeared in 2017 and the 5th edition is scheduled for next year. In 2019, he published a scholarly edition of Esther Singleton’s long-forgotten classic, Shakespearian Fantasias (1929), an Oxfordian-influenced book with which Henry Folger, founder of the Folger Shakespeare Library, was deeply fascinated, as discussed in Warren’s introduction (p. x) and in Maycock, “Branding the Author” (2016) (pp. 18–19 in print PDF version).
Jim has published several scholarly articles as well, including “Oxfordian Theory, Continental Drift, and the Importance of Methodology” in The Oxfordian (2015), and “Engaging Academia” in Brief Chronicles (2016). He is also the author of Summer Storm (2016), a novel about the complications that arise when a literature professor is bitten by the Oxfordian bug.
Jim met in 2019 with J. Thomas Looney’s elderly grandson and great-granddaughter, now residing in Scotland, who entrusted him with a previously unknown treasure trove of Looney’s personal letters and other documents, providing new insights about their ancestor’s Shakespearean studies. Warren is arranging for their preservation in a suitable university archive, as well as appropriate publication. Looney’s surviving family, while cherishing their privacy, have expressed their gratitude to the SOF and our British sister organization, the De Vere Society, for keeping his work and memory alive. Jim and former SOF Centennial Committee Chair Kathryn Sharpe deserve much credit for fostering our cordial relationship with the family. The SOF recently celebrated the 150th anniversary of Looney’s birth, even as we continue to celebrate the centennial of his revolutionary book.
(Update: During 2021, Warren 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.)
[published Oct. 8, 2020; updated 2021]
