Daily Inspiration Quote by William Shakespeare

A line like this lands because it turns the human face into a moral battleground. Shakespeare isn’t merely scolding vanity; he’s indicting performance itself: the daily, socially rewarded act of swapping out the self for a mask that sells better. “God hath given you one face” carries the weight of divine authorship, as if authenticity is not a lifestyle choice but a kind of sacred assignment. Then the knife twist: “and you make yourselves another.” The second face isn’t accidental. It’s manufactured, willed, practiced.

In context, it’s Hamlet lashing out at Gertrude, and the attack is as intimate as it is theological. He’s accusing her not only of sexual and political betrayal (the hasty remarriage to Claudius), but of psychic treason: the ability to wear composure while rotting inside. The word “make” is doing heavy lifting. It suggests cosmetics, yes, but also self-deception, revisionism, the rewriting of one’s own motives until they look presentable.

The line works because it weaponizes a commonplace Renaissance anxiety: that appearances are unstable and therefore dangerous. Shakespeare’s Denmark is a place where smiling can be a form of espionage. Hamlet’s disgust with “another face” is really disgust with a world where identity is pliable, and pliability looks a lot like guilt. The irony, of course, is that Hamlet himself becomes an artist of the second face - “antic disposition” as survival tactic. Shakespeare lets the accusation boomerang: in a corrupt court, sincerity can be immoral, and masks can be the only honest response.