Authorship Debate Quotes

I do not see how it is possible for an intelligent human being to conclude that the Song of Solomon is the work of God, and that the tragedy of Lear was the work of an uninspired man.

The whole history of these books (i.e. the Gospels) is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.

Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor.

There are a lot of theories about Shakespeare.

I think it's about as likely Jane Austen was gay as that she was found out to be a man.

The fact that the biblical book Hebrews is not an epistle of St Paul, or of any other apostle, is proved by what it says in chapter two.

I have often reaped what others have sowed. My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name Goethe.

The learned are not agreed as to the time when the Gospel of John was written; some dating it as early as the year 68, others as late as the year 98; but it is generally conceded to have been written after all the others.

Plays are frequently infected with ideas that came from actors or even sound engineers. Some Shakespeare scholars wonder whether some of the Bard's lines came from onstage improvisations by actors.

A third...candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn't too dead to work.

Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare; and even he can tell nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us; that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour.

I think that was very important to Bacon... personally. I think he went to great efforts to get a house for the Stratford man, to make it so difficult for us to prove that it was Francis Bacon, because it is very difficult to prove.

And it is a very beautiful idea, and possibly true, that a common man from Stratford with a common education was able to write these plays.

Coroners' inquests by learned societies can't make Shakespeare a dead man.

Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon The author of Lear remains unshaken Willie Herbert or Mary Fitton What does it matter? The Sonnets were written.

In the work of the greatest geniuses, humble beginnings will reveal themselves somewhere, but one cannot trace the slightest sign of them in Shakespeare ... I am not concerned with who wrote the works of Shakespeare ... but I can hardly think it was the Stratford boy. Whoever wrote them had an aristocratic attitude.

There is no way that the Fourth Gospel was written by John Zebedee or by any of the disciples of Jesus. The author of this book is not a single individual, but is at least three different writers/editors, who did their layered work over a period of 25 to 30 years.

Hebrews . This book is much superior to most of the writings attributed to St. Paul, though passages in the other books are very admirable.

Shakespeare often writes so ill that you hesitate to believe he could ever write supremely well; or, if this way of putting it seem indecorous and abominable, he very often writes so well that you are loth to believe he could ever have written thus extremely ill.

Some people would ask: 'You are not the one who does the painting, or shot the work, how can it be your work?' But I was the one who chose which site we should use, and which assistant helps me to do the painting, or the shot.

I know not, sir, whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if he did not, it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his life.

So there's a lot of people tied into believing that the traditional response to the authorship question. In terms of actors, some people get very angry about it.

If Bill Finger created Batman, where is Bill Finger's byline on my strip? It is conspicuous by its absence.

If you expect me to believe that a lawyer wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream, I must be dafter than I look.

It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.