Reputable Thinker's Opinions on Shakespeare and Bacon

 "Wilde (Lord Penzance)  argued, following Lord Campbell and others, that the works of Shakespeare are extremely accurate in matters of law. In The Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy (1890) he wrote of "Shakespeare's perfect familiarity with... English law... so perfect and intimate that he was never incorrect and never at fault", arguing that this was evidence that the plays were the work of a legal expert such as Bacon.[8] Several other authors followed Wilde's arguments about the legal expertise used in Shakespeare, including Sir George Greenwood." 

--  Wikipedia

"The Baconian thesis has up to this day been asserted in presence of three successive generations by able and most sincere writers . . . Such a controversy is therefore not disdainfully to be set aside, nor a priori declared unworthy of consideration."

.-- Journal Des Debats, Paris, 1903

"I cannot accord it to him who, though rich, did not educate his children, and who, though he sought fame through a coat-of-arms claimed to have been earned by the valor of his great-grandfather, nowhere, not even in his last will and testament, claimed the fame of authorship,--such authorship,--and whose sole posthumous anxiety centred on his dust and bones remaining undisturbed in the chancel of Stratford church." 

-- J. Warren Keifer, Former Speaker of the National House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., 1904

"You ask my opinion, in a few words, upon the Bacon-Shakspere controversy, which has been a study of immense interest to me for nearly twenty years. In examining a problem of such importance to  English literature as the authorship of the plays attributed to Shakspere one can hardly use too great deliberation. I felt this so strongly that it was only after about ten years' reading and reflection that I became a convinced Baconian. I have been brought to this conclusion mainly by the impossibility of reconciling the facts we know concerning the life of the man of Stratford with the technical and universal knowledge inherent in the plays."

-- Hon. William Waldorf Astor, attorney, politican, businessman, newspaper publisher, 1904