Shakespeare and Bacon - Towering Intellects

 Shakespeare read Plato:

Shakspeare "Thy promises are like Adonis' gardens, That one day bloomed and fruitful were the next". This couplet must have been suggested by Plato (Jowett's translation): Would a husbandman, said Socrates, who is a man of sense, take the seeds, which he values and which he wishes to be fruitful, and in sober earnest plant them during the heat of summer, in some garden of Adonis....?

Personal friend appraisal

"It will go near to pose any other nation of Europe, to muster out in any age, four men, who in so many respects should excel four such as we are able to show them: Cardinal Wolsey, Sir Thomas More, Sir Philip Sidney, and Sir Francis Bacon. The fourth was a creature of incomparable abilities of mind, of a sharp and catching apprehension, large and faithful memory, plentiful and sprouting, deep and solid judgment, for as such as might concern the understanding part. A man so rare in knowledge, of so many several kinds endued with the facility and felicity of expressing it all in so eloquent, significant, so abundant, and yet so choice and ravishing, a way of words, of metaphors and allusions as, perhaps, the world hath not seen, since it was a world. I know this may seem a great hyperbole, and strange kind of excess of speech, but the best means of putting me to shame will be, for you to place any other man of yours by this of mine." 

- Tobie Mathew, close friend of F. Bacon

"About the same time I remember an answer of mine in a manner which had some affinity with my Lord's cause, which though it grew from me, went after about in others names." 

- F. Bacon

Expert appraisal

“…the acknowledgement that he was intellectually one of the most colossal of the sons of men has been nearly unanimous. They who have not seen his greatness under one form have discovered it in another; there is a discordance among men’s ways of looking at him, or their theories respecting him; but the mighty shadow which he projects athwart the two bygone centuries lies there immovable, and still extending as time extends, . . . .He belongs not to mathematical or natural science, but to literature and to moral science in its most extensive acceptation,--to the realm of imagination, of wit, of eloquence, of aesthetics, of history, of jurisprudence, of political philosophy, of logic, of metaphysics and the investigation of the powers and operations of the human mind. . . . All his works, his essays, his philosophical writings, commonly so called, and what he has done in history, are of one and the same character; reflective and, so to speak, poetical, not simply demonstrative, or elucidatory of mere matters of fact.  What, then, is his glory?—in what did his greatness consist? In this, we should say;--that an intellect at once one of the most capacious and one of the most profound ever granted to a mortal—in its powers of vision at the same time one of the most penetrating and one of the most far-reaching—was in him united and reconciled with an almost equal endowment of the imaginative faculty; and that he is, therefore, of all philosophical writers, the one in whom are found together, in the largest proportions, depth of thought and splendor of eloquence.  His intellectual ambition, also,--a quality of the imagination,--was of the most towering character; . . . . His Advancement of Learning and his Novum Organum have more in them of the spirit of poetry than of science; and we should almost as soon think of fathering modern physical science upon Paradise Lost as upon them.”

- George L. Craik, LL.D., Professor and Chair of History and of English Literature in Queen’s College, Belfast