Shakespeare, a wool-comber, poacher, or whatever else at Stratford in Warwickshire, who happened to write books! The finest human figure, as I apprehend, that Nature has hitherto seen fit to make of our widely diffused Teutonic clay. Saxon, Norman, Celt or Sarmat, I find no human soul so beautiful, these fifteen hundred known years;—our supreme modern European man.
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). “Geschichte der Teutschen Sippschaft,” translated by Carlyle in Chartism, 1839. Critical and Miscellaneous Essays.
It is to be doubted whether even Shakespeare could have told a story like Homer, owing to that incessant activity and superfœtation of thought, a little less of which might be occasionally desired even in his plays;—if it were possible, once possessing anything of his, to wish it away.
Leigh Hunt (1784-1859). “What is Poetry?” Imagination and Fancy, 1844. Ed. A. S. Cook, 1893, p. 65.
Now, literature, philosophy, and thought are Shakespearised. His mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see.
R. W. Emerson (1803-1882). “Representative Men.” Shakespeare; or the Poet, 1844.