Daily Inspiration Quote by H. C. Bunner

Shakespeare gets reduced to a kind of early-modern content factory: a “dramatist of note” whose real job, Bunner jokes, was supplying future generations with quotable lines. The barb is gentle but pointed. “Of note” sounds like a polite encyclopedia tag, the kind that drains genius into résumé-speak. Then Bunner flips the knife with “lived by writing things to quote,” shrinking Shakespeare’s messy, theatrical, collaborative art into a single market function: produce copy that survives as detachable wisdom.

The intent is less anti-Shakespeare than anti-reverence. Bunner, a journalist, knows how culture turns living work into reusable fragments. Newspapers (and the lecture circuit, and the parlor anthology) thrive on excerpts, maxims, and the authority of a name. His line anticipates our current quote-industrial complex: Shakespeare as a brand that certifies whatever sentiment you want to dress up as timeless.

Subtext: we don’t just admire Shakespeare; we use him. Quotation is a social power move, a way to borrow prestige and end an argument without arguing. Bunner’s phrasing makes that transactional. Shakespeare “lived by” writing for the stage, but posterity lives by mining him for captions.

Context matters: late-19th-century Anglophone culture was deep in Bardolatry, with Shakespeare treated as moral oracle and national monument. Bunner’s wit punctures that sanctimony. It’s a reminder that the canon isn’t only built by greatness; it’s built by what’s easy to carry around, repeat, and weaponize in conversation.