"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)
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