Leadership Quote by George Villiers

Plot, in Villiers's line, is treated like a stagehand: useful only insofar as it can wheel on the glittering props. The phrasing does two things at once. "What the devil" performs impatience as a kind of sophistication, the courtly shrug of someone who has seen enough earnest moralizing to find it boring. And "fine things" is deliberately vague, a silky euphemism that can mean anything from witty turns of phrase to lavish spectacle to the pleasures of intimacy and intrigue. The point is not that plot is worthless; its purpose is instrumental, a pretext that licenses ornament.

That sensibility fits a Jacobean world where entertainment, patronage, and politics were tangled together. Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, rose by charm, access, and display as much as by policy. In a court economy built on favor, narrative coherence is less valuable than moments that impress: a masque that flatters the king, a speech that lands, a costume that signals power, a strategic flourish that keeps attention. His quote reads like an aesthetic manifesto, but it doubles as a political one: events don't need to add up if they keep the audience dazzled.

There's also a sly self-portrait embedded here. Villiers implies he knows the trick: you sell the "plot" so you can deliver the "fine things". It's an argument for surfaces with teeth behind it, the kind of cynicism that sounds light until you realize how neatly it describes governance-by-spectacle.