Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter Shaffer

The line lands because it treats theater as a kind of secular incarnation: rehearsal turns ink into bodies, breath, timing, embarrassment, and accident. “Making the word flesh” raids biblical phrasing on purpose, borrowing the heft of John’s Gospel to argue that drama only fully exists when language gets a pulse. Shaffer, a playwright obsessed with ritual, performance, and the dangerous electricity between audience and actor (Equus, Amadeus), is insisting that the script is not the artwork so much as a score. Rehearsal is where the score becomes sound, and sound becomes a social event.

The second sentence is the sly twist. Publishing feels like preservation, prestige, permanence. Shaffer calls it “reversing the process,” a demotion from lived encounter back into static text. It’s not anti-literary; it’s a reminder that print flattens the very things rehearsal discovers: tempo, silence, physicality, the charged misreadings that make a line newly truthful. A published play can be “read,” but it can’t sweat. It can be interpreted, but it can’t misfire in a way that suddenly reveals something essential.

Context matters: Shaffer wrote in a period when theater competed with film and television’s reproducibility. The quote is a defense of liveness against the archive, and a quiet critique of how institutions reward what can be collected. The intent is almost pedagogical: don’t mistake the blueprint for the building, or the relic for the rite.