Daily Inspiration Quote by Allan Carr

Allan Carr’s “I hate Shakespeare. I think Shakespeare’s rubbish” lands less like a considered verdict on the canon and more like a producer’s grenade lobbed into a room full of reverence. Coming from a director best known for glossy, high-wattage spectacle, the line reads as an act of positioning: a refusal to genuflect before “serious” culture that has long been used as a sorting mechanism in the arts. Shakespeare isn’t just a writer here; he’s a credential. Calling him “rubbish” is Carr’s way of saying, I don’t need your password.

The bluntness is the point. “Hate” is not a nuanced critical term; it’s a mood, a dare. It suggests exhaustion with the way Shakespeare gets treated as mandatory greatness, a cultural tax you pay to be considered legitimate. Carr’s repetition (“Shakespeare… Shakespeare’s”) heightens the provocation, like he’s mocking the constant invocation of the name as a trump card in any argument about taste.

There’s also a class-and-access subtext: Shakespeare often functions as a gatekeeping tool, taught and performed in ways that reward insiders who already know how to decode it. A showman like Carr, whose instincts run toward immediacy and mass appeal, may be reacting not to the plays themselves but to the institutional piety surrounding them. The line is anti-snobbery with a chip on its shoulder.

Context matters: late-20th-century entertainment was increasingly unapologetic about commerce and pop pleasure. Carr’s jab captures that cultural pivot, insisting that popular work doesn’t need to borrow prestige from dead geniuses to justify its existence.