I think Goethe, Dante, Virgil & Homer are exempt from criticism as foreigners. Who comes up as your top five writers in English?

Besides Shakespeare, the top list includes Byron & Scott. Judging from later discussions, I think a longer list would have included Poe, Whitman, Shelley, Keats, & Wordsworth, but Murray doesn't include a fuller sorted listed. (He gives all the rankings for figures in Western Literature in pg562 which you could extract the full English literature ranking from if you really wanted to, but I didn't.)

Heck, I'll bite your bullet; I don't think one could openly suggest Goethe was better than Shakespeare

It would be difficult to make that suggestion, yes, in part because Goethe himself so praised Shakespeare, and it would be a temerarious person indeed who dared disagree with the writer he was trying to claim as being better.

(That page, incidentally, is interesting reading who anyone who thinks that Bardolatry is unfounded and unrelated to his merits. Why would Milton, that most independent-minded man, praise Shakespeare so, anonymously, just 16 years after his death? What literary conspiracy could have been formed by that point?)