[3] In 1922 he wrote a biography of his grandmother, The Stage Life of Mrs Stirling: With Some Sketches of the Nineteenth Century Theatre.

These included two full-length comedies, Tradition and the Torch and Comers Down the Wind, along with two one-act plays, The Seekers and The Life that's Free.

In 1929, he published Shakespeare, Jonson and Wilkins as Borrowers, drawing attention to the wide range of sources appropriated by Elizabethan dramatists.

Looney wrote that Allen and another follower, Bernard Mordaunt Ward, were "advancing certain views respecting Oxford and Queen Eliz.

"[7][8] This was the suggestion that the queen had a son by Oxford, which first appears in an appendix to The Life Story of Edward De Vere.

Allen argues that a passage in Two Gentlemen of Verona is a reference to the queen's pregnancy, which could easily be concealed in those days by the "fashion of dress of great ladies".

[9] A later book claimed that the child was an actor named William Hughes, and then finally Allen argued that it was Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, the dedicatee of Shakespeare's poems.

He consulted the medium Hester Dowden seeking to contact his brother and find support for his beliefs.

De Vere stated that he collaborated with other writers to create the plays and confirmed that the Ashbourne portrait depicted him.

The controversy caused by the events forced Allen to stand down as president of the Oxfordian organisation the Shakespeare Fellowship, to which he had been elected in 1944.

He was described as a pleasant and entertaining speaker by the Oxfordian journal Shakespearean Authorship Review, which stated that "he held his audience tightly in his mesh of literary fascination".