Daily Inspiration Quote by H. C. Bunner

A two-line jab that lands because it pretends to be praise. Calling Shakespeare merely "Shake" is the first needle: a casual nickname that shrinks the Bard down to a brand, something you can pick up and pocket. Then Bunner slips in the real point. "A dramatist of note" sounds like a respectable epitaph, but the rhyme tightens into a punchline: he "lived by writing things to quote". The compliment becomes an accusation about how culture metabolizes art.

Bunner, a late-19th-century American journalist and light-verse satirist, is writing from inside an emerging quote economy: newspapers, magazines, recitation culture, and a middle class hungry for ready-made eloquence. Shakespeare, already canonized, is also already merchandised - not with T-shirts yet, but with anthology snippets, commonplace books, and the social currency of dropping a line at the right dinner party moment. Bunner's couplet skewers that habit with an almost modern skepticism: the work is treated less as drama meant to be staged than as a quarry for portable wisdom.

The subtext isn’t anti-Shakespeare so much as anti-quotation-as-consumption. It hints that immortality gets mistaken for usability: if a line can be lifted cleanly, we congratulate ourselves for recognizing it and call that engagement. Bunner’s joke is a warning about how reputations are flattened - the playwright turned into a vending machine for "things to quote", the messy, living theater reduced to a highlight reel.