"[Looney’s] great contribution to Shakespearean authorship has long been out of print and the plates were destroyed in the London blitz. It is particularly fortunate to have it restored to the active lists because many smaller libraries did not purchase [the English edition] in 1920. Circulating and many reference copies have long since been worn out . . . Highly Recommended."

   
    "Once having read this book, I doubt if anyone, friend or foe, will ever forget it."

Gelett Burgess, letter to a correspondent, May 19, 1920

   "[Basso reviewed "Shakespeare" Identified and five books taking the view that Shakspeare of Stratford wrote the plays.] The one thing [the five books by Bliss, Brown, Chute, Cooper and Pearson] have in common — besides their preoccupation with the same subject — is the making of bricks without much straw . . . As a brick maker, Pearson seems to come out ahead of anybody else . . . Bliss sensibly points out the facts about his subject can be written on a half sheet of notepaper . . . Brown has drawn too many sweeping conclusions from too little evidence . . . Let us take Miss Chute at her foreword . . . She has based her book entirely, she says, "on contemporary documents . . . The confusion that surrounds Shakespeare’s life has not been caused by any lack of information . . ." Having made so large a promise . . . We can only wait for Miss Chute to stand and deliver . . . But she doesn’t. She, too, is hamstrung by a paucity of source materials . . . she has two ways of overcoming the difficulty, by making one flat unproved statement after another, and by using 'if' and 'probable[y]' . . . .
     "At this point I think we had better let Mr. Looney take the stand . . . His contention, put forward in nearly five hundred sober, modest, heavily documented pages is . . . That Shakespeare was not the Shakespeare that Mr. Bliss, Mr. Cooper, Mr. Brown, Mr. Pearson and Miss Chute take for granted . . . Mr. Looney is no crank. He is an earnest level-headed man who has spent years trying to solve the world’s most baffling literary mystery . . . If the case were brought to court, it is hard to see how Mr. Looney could lose . . . The various "mysteries" that surround Shakespeare . . . are mysteries no longer if the man we know as Shakespeare was really Edward de Vere . . . ."

   "It is impossible to do justice to the wealth of evidence collected by Mr. Looney, or to the ingenuity displayed by him in its coordination . . . The most remarkable aspect of his labors is that they affect not only the central problem of William Shakespeare’s relation to the work named after him, but a whole series of literary enigmas that have puzzled every painstaking student of this period for nearly two hundred years. There is the problem of the lyrics excluded from the plays of Lyly, author of Euphues and private secretary to Oxford, on their first publication — one of which is practically identical with one of the lyrics in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There is the problem of Shepherd Willie in Spenser’s The Shepheard’s Calendar, 1579 . . . The peculiar thing is that all these problems seem to fall into place and form a consistent picture the moment you accept the theory of Oxford’s connection with the Shakespearian plays . . . Mr. Looney . . . has opened most promising vistas, and it is to be hoped his leads will be followed up. The days are past when a new Shakespearian theory can be laughed out of court . . . We should be moved solely by a desire for truth, and nothing that may be helpful in finding it should be despised."

Edwin Björkman, The Bookman Vol. 51, 1920