It is not too much to say, that the great plays of Shakespeare would lose less by being deprived of all the passages which are commonly called the fine passages, than those passages lose by being read separately from the play. This is, perhaps, the highest praise which can be given to a dramatist.
Lord Macaulay (1800-1859). Edinburgh Review, June 1831, vol. liii. pp. 567-8.
I believe Shakespeare was not a whit more intelligible in his own day than he is now to an educated man, except for a few local allusions of no consequence. And I said, he is of no age—nor, I may add, of any religion, or party, or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind: his observation and reading, which were considerable, supplied him with the drapery of his figures.
S. T. Coleridge (1772-1834). Table Talk, 15 March 1834.
I would be willing to live only as long as Shakespeare were the mirror to Nature.
Id., Letters, etc., 1836, i. 196.