Daily Inspiration Quote by William Shakespeare

Courtship, in Shakespeare’s hands, isn’t romance so much as weather: a performance of seasons, timed to desire and social contract. “Men are April when they woo, December when they wed” lands like a joke with teeth. April is fickle, bright, and changeable-the perfect climate for flattery, vows, and theatrical self-invention. December is not merely cold; it’s settled, stripped of ornament, a time when the chase is over and the man’s energy turns inward or elsewhere. The line isn’t an eternal “men are like this” platitude so much as a cynical diagnosis of how incentives warp behavior: pursuit rewards charm; possession rewards complacency.

The second half cuts sharper because it flips the sentimental script. “Maids are May when they are maids” invokes freshness and social value: May is youth at its peak, culturally prized and publicly legible. “But the sky changes when they are wives” refuses a neat seasonal equivalent. Not “June” or “August,” but a shift in atmosphere-a loss of predictability, a system changing state. The subtext is about marriage as a reclassification that alters how women are perceived and how they’re allowed to appear. Maidenhood is a season others celebrate; wifehood is a climate others police.

In context, Shakespeare is writing inside a marketplace of marriages, dowries, and reputations, where wooing is strategic speech and wedlock is governance. The wit works because it’s compact and meanly accurate: weather as social psychology, meteorology as misogyny, a punchline that exposes the bargain underneath the poetry.