Daily Inspiration Quote by Edward Hall

A lawyer praising Shakespeare for exposing our urge to dominate is less a literary compliment than a worldview confession. Edward Hall isn’t reaching for Shakespeare as ornament; he’s recruiting him as a witness. “Reveals” and “shines a light” borrow the language of evidence and illumination: the courtroom fantasy that, if you hold something up clearly enough, its true shape becomes undeniable. The target isn’t romance or poetry but power, the basic social technology everyone uses and few admit to.

The phrasing matters. “Human nature” sounds lofty, then Hall pins it to something blunt and bodily: “instinctive desire.” That’s a strategic move, implying dominance isn’t just a cultural accident or a moral failing; it’s a default setting. By framing it as instinct, he smuggles in a kind of fatalism that conveniently echoes legal realism: people act from interest, fear, ego, and status before they act from principle. The subtext is wary, almost prosecutorial: stop pretending persuasion is pure. Watch how quickly affection turns transactional, how loyalty becomes leverage, how language becomes a weapon.

Shakespeare is the perfect accomplice because his plays dramatize domination as both spectacle and habit: kings clinging to legitimacy, spouses negotiating control, friends performing allegiance while angling for advantage. Hall’s intent, then, isn’t to reduce Shakespeare to cynicism but to argue for Shakespeare’s usefulness. Read him, and you become harder to con - and harder to console yourself with the myth that power is only what bad people chase.