"Its better to be fortunate than wise"
About this Quote
A Jacobean playwright doesn’t offer “better to be fortunate than wise” as self-help; it’s a stage whisper from a world where virtue routinely loses and accidents routinely win. Webster’s drama is obsessed with the mismatch between merit and outcome. In that universe, wisdom is a candle in a drafty room: it helps you see the knives, but it doesn’t stop the hand that throws them. Fortune, by contrast, is the invisible patron with the only power that matters - the random gust that closes a door before the assassin arrives, the unexpected inheritance, the ruler’s passing mood.
The line works because it’s a value judgment that sounds like a resignation. “Better” isn’t moral; it’s practical. Webster collapses the Renaissance ideal of prudence into something almost pathetic: intelligence becomes a liability when it makes you aware of how little control you actually have. The subtext is corrosive: if luck outranks wisdom, then social order isn’t a ladder of excellence but a lottery dressed up as hierarchy. That cynicism is quintessentially Jacobean, sharpened by court politics where survival depended less on insight than on proximity, timing, and the king’s favor.
There’s also a sly theatricality in the phrasing. Wisdom is earned, interior, slow. Fortune is bestowed, external, sudden. Onstage, sudden is spectacle - the twist, the reversal, the catastrophe. Webster is reminding his audience that the plot of a life, like the plot of a tragedy, is rarely authored by the wisest character. It’s awarded to the luckiest one.
The line works because it’s a value judgment that sounds like a resignation. “Better” isn’t moral; it’s practical. Webster collapses the Renaissance ideal of prudence into something almost pathetic: intelligence becomes a liability when it makes you aware of how little control you actually have. The subtext is corrosive: if luck outranks wisdom, then social order isn’t a ladder of excellence but a lottery dressed up as hierarchy. That cynicism is quintessentially Jacobean, sharpened by court politics where survival depended less on insight than on proximity, timing, and the king’s favor.
There’s also a sly theatricality in the phrasing. Wisdom is earned, interior, slow. Fortune is bestowed, external, sudden. Onstage, sudden is spectacle - the twist, the reversal, the catastrophe. Webster is reminding his audience that the plot of a life, like the plot of a tragedy, is rarely authored by the wisest character. It’s awarded to the luckiest one.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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