"The mere theory that Bacon was the real author of the plays, though the mass of Shakespeare's readers still set it down as a delusion, does not, indeed, contain anything essentially shocking to common sense. On the contrary, it is generally recognized that on purely a priori grounds there is less to shock common sense in the idea that those wonderful compositions were the work of a scholar, a philosopher, a statesman, and a profound man of the world than there is in the idea that they were the work of a notoriously ill-educated actor, who seems to have found some difficulty in signing his own name."
--W. H. Mallock, 1901
"The difficulty hitherto of getting a fair hearing for the mere literary argument has chiefly arisen from the illogical resentment shown by many people at the bare idea of dethroning a national idol. Shakespeare has so long been thought of as a genius of the very foremost order that any suggestion, tending to prove that he was a very commonplace person in reality, is treated as though it involved an attempt to detract from the sublimity of the works bearing his name. But in reason it must be conceded that we worship the memory of Shakespeare because we admire Hamlet, king Lear, and the rest. We do not admire the plays because any particular man wrote them . . . The question is still one which most English newspapers and periodicals are afraid to discuss freely for fear of offending the blind prejudice above referred to. Orthodox Shaksperean biographers simply ignore the all important question as though it were a craze in notorious antagonism to well-known facts, like the idea that the earth is flat, and in this way the minds of people who might be capable of independent judgment, if they had the evidence before them, are left in complete ignorance of the prodigious force residing in the Baconian argument -- unless, indeed, they have gone out of their way to make a special study of the Baconian books."
--A.P. Sinnet, 1901
"It is desperately hard, nay, impossible to believe that this uninstructed, untutored youth, as he came from Stratford, should have written these plays; and almost as hard, as it seems to me, to believe that he should have rendered himself capable of writing them by elaborate study afterwards . . . The difficulty of imagining this your man to have converted himself in a few years from a state bordering on ignorance into a deeply read student, master of French and Italian, as well as of Greek and Latin, and capable of quoting and borrowing largely from writers in all these languages, is almost insuperable . . . His name once removed from the controversy, there will not, i think, be much question as to the lawyer to whose pen the Shakespeare plays are to be attributed."
--Lord Penzance, 1903
"I am not a Baconian, but I have a perfectly open mind on the matter. I have no objection at all to being convinced that Sir Francis Bacon wrote the splended dramas attributed to Shakespeare; it is so much easier to suppose from our unquestionable knowledge of his life and genius that he MIGHT have written them, than to accept from the unquestioned little that we know of Shakspere and his life that he COULD have done so. It is unnecessary to refer at length to the extraordinary similarity in the knowledge of law, science, art, politics, history, literature, and every other branch of human understanding, exhibited by Shakespeare and Bacon."
--R. B. Marston, 1902
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