I know they were political philosophers during and after Shakespeare'a time, but Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes works were far above the quality, depth and intellectual innovation in terms of substantiative material than anything Shakespeare ever wrote. If one reads Machiavelli's The Prince or the Chronicles, ideas and themes are amazingly simple, clear, straight-to-the-point, and razor sharp in his socio-political analysis or commentaries in contrast to a lot of Shakespeare's turgid, cumbersome prose in his plays.