John Thomas Looney (luni) (14 August 1870 – 17 January 1944) was an English school teacher who is notable for having originated the Oxfordian theory, which claims that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550–1604) was the true author of Shakespeare's plays.

[2] In 1922 he joined with George Greenwood to establish The Shakespeare Fellowship, the organisation which subsequently carried forward public discussion of the authorship question up to the 1940s.

Two of his followers, Percy Allen and B. M. Ward, developed the Prince Tudor theory, which claimed that Oxford and Queen Elizabeth I were lovers and had a son together.

"[2][6] 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's book begins by outlining many of the familiar anti-Stratfordian arguments about Shakespeare of Stratford's supposedly poor education and unpoetic personality.

Since de Vere died in 1604, many years before a number of Shakespeare's works appeared, Looney argued that there is an abrupt change in publication history and in the style of plays apparently written after 1604.

Looney suggested that de Vere was also responsible for some of the literary works published under the names of Arthur Golding, Anthony Munday and John Lyly.

The reviewer for The Outlook dismissed the book after reading but a few chapters, writing that it appeared "to have all the paraphernalia of scholarship but little of its critical spirit" with "sweeping suppositions" based on little evidence.

[8] In The Times Literary Supplement review, A. W. Pollard praised the author for his honesty in admitting to his ignorance of Early Modern poetry and drama, to which he attributes Looney's methods and conclusions.

He calls the book "a sad waste of print and paper" and writes that Looney's arguments for Oxford are much more strained and incredulous than those for Shakespeare, and also points out some glaring lapses of logic.

He writes that "The verbal parallels between Oxford's Paradise poems and Shakespeare's works which Mr. Looney painstakingly amasses are, on the whole, mere commonplaces, often straight-out proverbs, that could be vastly increased in bulk by a person familiar with Elizabethan poetry.

He took the case against the Stratford man, put forward by the Baconians and widely accepted, and combined its conclusions with the post-Dowden desire to read the plays as representing an intimate, credible, psycho-drama.He goes on to say that Oxfordism's principles—late expressions of the prevailing critical fashions of their times—were outdated by changing critical scholarship, and that Oxfordians must find some other way to relate to contemporary scholarship if they expect the theory to be taken seriously outside of Oxfordian circles.

Reading Oxfordian scholarship one often encounters a slippery area in which it is unclear whether Oxford's authorship of the plays is being argued for, or simply assumed.... Looney's conclusions cannot be proved true, and believing them requires some degree of "faith."

… That argument needs to be updated, if it is to stimulate serious academic interest … The biographical approach to literature now needs to be theoretically justified before many of the claims for De Vere's authorship of the plays are pressed further.

… they need to show that such ideas enjoyed a currency in the late sixteenth century before devoting much attention to the specific case for alleged relationship between De Vere and the Shakespearean corpus.