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
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