RALPH WALDO EMERSON, b. 1803, d. 1882.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great American philosopher and poet, says: "As long as the question is of talent and mental power, the world of men has not his equal to show.... The Egyptian verdict of the Shakespeare Societies comes to mind that he was a jovial actor and manager. I cannot marry this fact to his verse."—Emerson's Works. London, 1883. Vol. 4, p. 420.
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, b. 1807, d. 1892.
John Greenleaf Whittier, the American poet, declared: "Whether Bacon wrote the wonderful plays or not, I am quite sure the man Shakspere neither did nor could."
DR. W. H. FURNESS, b. 1802, d. 1891.
Dr. W. H. Furness, the eminent American scholar, who was the father of the Editor of the Variorum Edition of Shakespeare's Works, wrote to Nathaniel Holmes in a letter dated Oct. 29th 1866: "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 F. Bacon to whom to assign the crown. In this case it would have been resting now on his head by almost common consent."
MARK TWAIN, b. 1835, d. 1910.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who wrote under the pseudonym of Mark Twain, was,—it is universally admitted,—one of the wisest of men. Last year (1909) he published a little book with the title, "Is Shakespeare dead?" In this he treats with scathing scorn those who can persuade themselves that the immortal plays were written by the Stratford clown. He writes, pp. 142-3: "You can trace the life histories of the whole of them [the world's celebrities] save one far and away the most colossal prodigy of the entire accumulation—Shakespeare. About him you can find out nothing. Nothing of even the slightest importance. Nothing worth the trouble of stowing away in your memory. Nothing that even remotely indicates that he was ever anything more than a distinctly common-place person—a manager,[15] an actor of inferior grade, a small trader in a small village that did not regard him as a person of any consequence, and had forgotten him before he was fairly cold in his grave. We can go to the records and find out the life-history of every renowned race-horse of modern times—but not Shakespeare's! There are many reasons why, and they have been furnished in cartloads (of guess and conjecture) by those troglodytes; but there is one that is worth all the rest of the reasons put together, and is abundantly sufficient all by itself—he hadn't any history to record. There is no way of getting around that deadly fact. And no sane way has yet been discovered of getting round its formidable significance. Its quite plain significance —to any but those thugs (I do not use the term unkindly) is, that Shakespeare had no prominence while he lived, and none until he had been dead two or three generations. The Plays enjoyed high fame from the beginning."
PRINCE BISMARCK, b. 1815, d. 1898.
We are told in Sydney Whitman's "Personal Reminiscences of Prince Bismarck," pp. 135-6, that in 1892, Prince Bismarck said, "He could not understand how it were possible that a man, however gifted with the intuitions of genius, could have written what was attributed to Shakespeare unless he had been in touch with the great affairs of state, behind the scenes of political life, and also intimate with all the social courtesies and refinements of thought which in Shakspeare's time were only to be met with in the highest circles."