Daily Inspiration Quote by James Agate

Agate’s line lands like a perfectly weighted paperweight: small, blunt, and designed to stop Shaw’s self-mythology mid-sentence. Calling the plays "the price we pay" flips the usual hierarchy. In theater, the play is supposed to be the main event and any prefatory remarks are garnish. Agate suggests the opposite: Shaw’s real performance happens in the prefaces, where he lectures, provocates, and argues with the confidence of a man who thinks the audience has come to hear him think.

The intent is both praise and takedown. It concedes the prefaces are dazzling - agile, polemical, full of intellectual snap - while implying the plays are a kind of necessary nuisance, the bureaucratic fee required to access Shaw’s true product: Shaw’s opinions. The subtext is weary admiration for a writer who can’t resist turning drama into a delivery system for debate. Agate is also needling Shaw’s brand. Shaw cultivated celebrity through talk: prefaces, essays, interviews, public quarrels. Agate’s quip implies the plays function as a legitimizing alibi, the respectable wrapper around what is essentially a one-man editorial page.

Context matters: early 20th-century British theater was negotiating the rise of the "idea play", and Shaw was its loudest salesman, packaging politics and moral argument as entertainment. Agate, as a critic, is defending a certain notion of dramatic primacy - action, character, theatrical pleasure - against the encroachment of authorial commentary. The joke works because it’s true enough to sting: Shaw’s prefaces are so alive they can make the plays feel like footnotes to the author’s mind.