Still More Shakespeare and Bacon at the turn of the Century

 "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

Additional Turn of the Century Observations on Shakespeare and Bacon

 "I can't help anticipating that, some of these days, Bacon letters or other papers will turn up, interpretive of his, at present, dark phrase to Sir John Davies, of 'your concealed poet.' We have noble contemporary poetry, unhappily anonymous, and I shall not be surprised to find Bacon the concealed singer of some of it. May I live to have my expectation verified."

-- Rev. Alexander B. Grosart, author of 'The Complete Poems of Joseph Hall'.

"To believe Shakspere to have written these wondrous works, saturated through and through with the reforming spirit of Francis Bacon, containing his philosophic theories and discoveries, advocating his new philosophy over that of Aristotle, containing the favorite, forceful phrases of his mother, the Lady Anne, his brother Anthony, and the Earl of Essex;--to believe that William Shakspere wrote these is to violate every principle of common sense, and be blind to truths plain as beacon lights for our guidance."

-- George James, 1896

"Only once grant that Bacon lacked imagination (he had infinite imagination), that he was devoid of humor (his humor was unbounded and inextinguishable), that he had no leisure to write the plays (he had years of waiting for place and work and years of struggle with debt), that he had no poetic faculty (his noblest prose is the highest poetry in all but metre), that he was cold and unsympathetic and selfish (Sir Tobie Matthew, and Rawleigh and other contemporaries did not think so)--only grant these postulates (all false) and a few others, and it will be certain that he did not write the plays"

-- Rev. L. C. Manchester, 1896

"The day has come when, rejecting fictitious lives of an imaginary Shakespeare, and scrutinizing the insignificant circumstances which are all that is known of him, the discrepancy becomes more and more apparent between the intellectual genius of the author of the plays and the sordid and squalid characteristics of the man of Stratford."

-- Pall Mall Gazette (London), 1900

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.