J. Thomas Looney

This article is about the teacher. For the mobster, see John Patrick Looney.

John Thomas Looney (1870 – 1944), pronounced "Lōney", was the originator of a theory about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays.

Looney is listed in Ward's Directory for 1899–1900 as a teacher living at 119 Rodsley Avenue, Gateshead, County Durham. He later resided at 15 Laburnum Gardens, Low Fell.

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 Edward 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. 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 was a member of The Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle Upon Tyne after 1911 and paid handsome tribute to the library; its unique system of operation, he said, "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 Edward de Vere's poems in December 1927.

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