Life & Wisdom Quote by Christopher Isherwood

Isherwood slips a pin into the balloon of artistic purity, and the hiss is the point. By dragging Shakespeare - the patron saint of untouchable genius - into the grubby, practical world of "the entertainment industry", he collapses the comforting myth that greatness is born in splendid isolation. The line works because it sounds casual ("I'll bet"), as if the most destabilizing truth about art is also the most obvious: if you want an audience, you negotiate with power, taste, money, and time.

The verb "compromised" is doing double duty. It can mean selling out, but it also means making terms, adjusting the work to the stage, the censors, the company, the box office. Isherwood isn't absolving anyone; he's normalizing the bargain. The subtext is a defense - of working writers, screenwriters, playwrights - against the moral posturing that treats commercial success as contamination. If even Shakespeare, endlessly repackaged as culture's gold standard, had to play the game, then the contemporary artist's compromises are less a personal failing than an occupational condition.

Context sharpens the edge: Isherwood straddled literature and Hollywood, high art and paid labor, and lived through eras when respectability politics and market pressures shaped what could be said and how. It's a wry refusal of martyrdom. The sentence asks for a more adult reading of art: not as a holy relic, but as a live performance made under constraints, where survival and expression are tangled, and the work that endures often does so because it learned to.