Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter Shaffer

Peter Shaffer reframes tragedy as a collision of legitimate values rather than a moral showdown with a clear villain. The deepest losses come when two compelling goods cannot be reconciled, and choosing one destroys or diminishes the other. The audience grieves not because evil triumphs, but because something worth cherishing must be sacrificed.

That sensibility runs through Shaffer’s major plays. In Equus, a psychiatrist seeks to heal a troubled boy, an obviously humane aim; at the same time, the boy’s fierce, quasi-religious passion gives his life meaning. Cure the patient and you may normalize him into emptiness; leave him as he is and you permit harm. Both paths claim moral right, and both exact a cost. Amadeus pits Salieri’s devotion to order and piety against Mozart’s unruly, divine genius. The drama’s agony arises from competing rights: the right of disciplined virtue to be honored and the right of unfettered talent to flourish. In The Royal Hunt of the Sun, missionary zeal and imperial ambition confront the dignity and sovereignty of an indigenous empire, each side armed with its own ethical claims.

Shaffer thus aligns with a long tradition, going back to Hegel’s idea that tragedy dramatizes a clash between two ethical worlds, like Antigone’s family duty against Creon’s civic law. The effect is to replace moral certainty with moral complexity. Characters are not monsters or saints; they are people compelled by values that matter. The tragic outcome feels inevitable because the world cannot accommodate both goods fully.

Such a view suits modern life, where pluralism and competing obligations shape everyday choices. Tragedy then becomes a lens for seeing how even the best intentions can collide, how integrity in one register can mean betrayal in another, and how catharsis arises from recognizing the limits of any single right to claim the whole of human truth.