exemplified by Edward Dowden's attempt to discover the personality of the author by gleaning clues from the works in his Shakspere (1875). Oxfordianism, from the start, assumed something similar.… In the cultural situation of the early twentieth century, Looney is quite understandable. 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He goes on to say that Oxfordism's principles—late expressions of the prevailing critical fashions of their times—were outdated by changing critical scholarship, and that Oxfordians must find some other way to relate to contemporary scholarship if they expect the theory to be taken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. Oxfordianism's premises were soon challenged by the emergence of "impersonal" and formalist criticisms. … Looney's theoretical assumptions were … becoming obsolete in 1920, and the following half century saw a more and more determined turn away from biographical criticism …. [Oxfordians'] work, indeed, seems to have paid no attention to changes in the academic approach to Shakespeare (and other English literature) since 1920. … By contrast, a reiterated claim of Oxfordian literature has been that the case is already, unarguably, complete. … this is akin to the claims made for religious texts…. 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." Put more simply, Looney made an argument, however much some might like to believe that he merely announced a discovery. … 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. Oxfordians have so far shown an unfortunate reluctance to question how much they work with post-"Romantic" assumptions about authorship. … 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. If this is not possible … then at least a much broader case needs to be constructed for the autobiographical nature of dramatic writing at that time.