Continued - Observations from 19th Century Educated Readers of Shakespeare and Bacon

 "When one comes to study the literature of the subject in an honest quest of truth, it will occur to him, as a strange feature of the controversy, that the literary world has confided for three hundred years in tradition alone, and thus accepted the belief that the jolly lessee of the Globe and Blackfriars wrote the celebrated plays, collected after his death in the folio of 1623; and yet, upon thorough investigation, it is manifest that he never wrote a line of them."

--John L. T. Sneed, Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of the State of Tennessee, 1891.

"I am convinced that Bacon left the MSS. Either with Percy (the Earl of Northumberland) or Sir Toby Matthew, with authority to publish after his death. But the civil war broke out, and the trustees may have thought that under the rule of Cromwell and the Puritans the memory of Bacon, as a philosopher, would have been ruined, if it were published that he was the author of these dramas. In the interest of their deceased friend, they may have destroyed the MSS., together with the key."

---Count Vitzthum D'Eckstadt, Privy Councillor to the Emperor of Austria, 1888

"Firmly convinced that Shakspere of Stratford could not have been the author."

--Walt Whitman, 1888

"I see by your aid, better than before, the strength of Bacon's claim."

--W.T. Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education

"There is nothing very outrageous in the supposition that the same mind might have given birth to the Essayas and 'Hamlet.'"

--The Daily News (London), 1902

More 19th Century Observations by those who read closely both Shakespeare and Bacon

 "That  Shakespeare possessed an altogether extraordinary knowledge of law, of medicine, of science, of philosophy, of language, of everything, in short, which would be impossible for an uneducated man, whatever his genius as a poet might be, has long seemed to me an insoluble mystery."

--Sir Lewis Morris, 1888.

"The philosophical writings of Bacon are suffused and saturated with Shakespeare's thought . . . These likenesses in thought and expression are mainly limited to those two contemporaries:.

--Gerald Massey, 1888

"Experience disposes me to think that most of the finer Shakespearean Plays may be illustrated from the works of Bacon in the same way. If this be so, it certainly suggests the exceeding probability that the universal genius, enthroned by Ben Jonson on the summit of Parnassus, and the author of the Plays were one and the same person."

--Prof. Samuel Edmund Bengough, 1890

"On the general question of the authorship of the Shakespeare Plays, I may say that I have no more  doubt that Lord Bacon was the author of all of them, and of the poetry attributed to Shakspere, than I have of the fact that Pope wrote the Essay on Man."

--Sir Joseph N. McKenna, M.P., 1891

Bacon's Writings resembles Shakespeare's Writings

 "This presents one of the most extraordinary facts in the history of the human mind. It makes necessary the conclusion that two men, living contemporaneously in the same town, then a comparatively small city, --one a philosopher, endowed with the most brilliant imagination, the other a most imaginative poet, possessing the profoundest philosophical genius, and both reckoned among the greatest thinkers the world ever saw--did, possibly in the same year, at the same time, and certainly at the same period of their lives, write, without any interchange of views or opinions, upon the same identical subjects, follow the same train of thought, arrive at the same conclusions, and digest the results of their study, reading and meditation into the same system or body of philosophy, the which one stated to the world in abstract scientific propositions, while the other embodied it in poetic forms and framatic creations. No coincidence of mental action so remarkable as this can be found, it is believed, in any other age of the world."

--Henry J. Ruggles, 1870.

"Identification will come in due time. Meanwhile the admissions show how able men perceive in the works of Bacon indications of a mind gifted with the highest poetic power."

--William Thomson, 1880.

"Bacon desired nothing less than a natural history of the passions, the very thing that Shakespeare produced."

--Kuno Fischer, Prof. of Philosophy at Heidelberg, and a foremost literary critic. Also not a Baconian.

"It has often been said of Shakespeare that he was even more of a philosopher than a poet. Bacon's ambition was to grasp the universe, making all knowledge his province. Lessing has profoundly remarked of Shakespeare that his drama is the mirror of nature. And M. de Remussat has said that in Bacon's ordinary way of reflecting and representing the characters and affairs of men we cannot but notice something which brings Shakespeare to mind.' The analogy between the two is certainly very strong."

--Louis De Raynal, 1888

More Early Educationed Observations on Bacon and Shakspeare

 Two observations on these quotes. One is the impressive number of well read intellectuals, a century or more ago, that saw the close similarities in the writings by Shakespeare and Bacon. Second is that one needs to be a deep reader of Bacon's works to see the similar styles or language usage between them. Nowadays it seems few intellectuals read Bacon any more so fewer are aware of these similarities.

"Thus it is easier to prove that if Shakspere wrote the literature we have an instance of a stupendous miracle than it is to prove that, although Bacon possessed all the qualifications , he might still have refrained from writing it. In the one case we should have to exercise that form of faith described as "believing what you know to be untrue," on the other there is no tax whatever upon one's faculty of credence."

-- H. Crouch Batchelor from Francis Bacon Wrote Shakespeare, 1910

"Bacon's similes, for their aptness and their vividness, are of a kind of which Shakespeare or Goethe or Richter might have been proud". 

-- Prof. J.S. Blackie (1886)

"He [Bacon] seems to have written his Essays with the pen of Shakespeare"

--Alexander Smith

"The wisdom displayed in Shakespeare is equal in profoundness to the great Lord Bacon's Novum Organum." 

-- Hazlitt, English Biographer, not a Baconian

"It has always struck me as extraordinary, and almost as a problem to be explained, how the two greatest Englishmen belonged to one era, nearly the same interval of years, how they lived, as it were, side by side, face to face, yet, so far as we could learn, were strangers to each other, the one a poetical philosopher, the other a philosophical poet". 

-- W. Carew Hazlitt, English biographer, and a Stratfordian

Bacon as Shakespeare Early Quotes

 "Thus we see that Bacon and Shakspere both flourished at the same time, and might, either of them, have written these works, as far as dates are concerned, and that Bacon not only had the requisite learning and experience, but also that his wit and poetic faculty were exactly of that peculiar kind which we find exhibited in these plays." . also "For upwards of twenty years I have held the opinion that Bacon was the author of the Shakespeare Plays." so from about 1837, preceeding Delia Bacon's publication of 1857.

-- Wiliam Henry Smith, 1857

"I am one of the many who have never been able to bring the life of William Shakespeare and the plays of Shakespeare within planetary space of each other. Are there any two things in the world more incongruous? Had the plays come down to us anonymously, had the labor of discovering the author been imposed upon after generations, I think we could have found no one of that day but Francis Bacon to whom to assign the crown. In this case it would have been resting now on his head by almost common consent".

- Dr. W. H. Furness, the eminent American scholar in a letter to Nathaniel Holmes, Oct. 29, 1866

"Nobody believes any longer that immediate inspiration is possible in modern times; . . . And yet everybody seems to take it for granted of this one man Shakspere." 

--James Russell Lowell, 1870.

Essays by Shakespeare and Bacon

 "He was not the mate of the literary characters of his day, and none knew it better than himself. It is a fraud upon the world to thrust his surreptitious fame upon us. The inquiry will be, who were the able literary men who wrote the dramas inputed to him?" 

-- Joseph C. Hart, 1848.

"We repeat, that there is nothing recorded in his everyday life that connects the two, except the simple fact of his selling poems and realising the proceeds, and their being afterwards published with his name attached; and the statements of Ben Jonson, which however are quite compatible with his being in the secret." 

-- Chamber's Edinburgh Journal, 1852

 "I would rather know that be known".

-Bacon's Promus (Notebook)

"Shakespeare is as astonishing for the exuberance of his genius in abstract notions, and for the depth of his analytical and philosophic insight, as for the scope and minuteness of his poetic imagination. It is as if into a mind poetical in form there had been poured all the matter that existed in the mind of his contemporary Bacon. In Shakespeare's plays we have thought, history, exposition, philosophy, all within the round of the poets. The only difference between him and Bacon sometimes is that Bacon writes an essay and calls it his own, while Shakespeare writes a similar essay and puts in into the mouth of a Ulysses or a Polonius."  

- David Masson in Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and other Essays (1874)