Life & Wisdom Quote by Lord Byron

Byron’s jab at Shakespeare isn’t ignorance so much as a performance of Romantic impatience with inherited authority. The line is built to sound like a confident correction delivered over a dinner table: “you may depend on it” is the tell. He’s not arguing; he’s recruiting. The phrase flatters the listener into joining a private club of clear-eyed skeptics who can see through the nation’s most sacred literary icon.

The provocation hinges on “absurdly too high.” Byron isn’t merely saying Shakespeare is overrated; he’s implying the culture has made a category error, mistaking scale for sanctity. Shakespeare’s reputation, in Byron’s view, has become a kind of public superstition: immune to taste, insulated from critique, endlessly cited as proof of England’s cultural supremacy. That’s the subtextual target: canon-building as patriotism, and reverence as a substitute for judgment.

Context matters. Byron writes from a moment when “Bardolatry” was congealing into civic religion, with critics and institutions turning Shakespeare into a monument. Romantic writers benefited from the idea of singular genius, yet they also chafed against the suffocating hierarchy it produced. Byron, celebrity poet and professional contrarian, had reason to puncture the balloon: deflating Shakespeare’s altitude makes room for rival greatness, including his own.

The final promise - “and will go down” - reads less like prediction than wish fulfillment. It’s iconoclasm as confidence trick: say the unthinkable with enough certainty, and you’ve already shifted the room’s center of gravity.