Life's Pleasures Quote by William Shakespeare

Wine gets personhood here, but not the cozy, candlelit kind. Shakespeare frames drink as an "invisible spirit" - a pun that does triple duty: alcohol as distilled spirit, intoxication as possession, and temptation as a force you feel most when you think youre in control. The line flatters wine with the language of prayer ("O thou"), then yanks the reader into moral clarity with a naming ritual: if it refuses a proper identity, we will brand it "devil". Thats not just Puritan finger-wagging; its a theatrical move, turning a private weakness into a character you can point at, bargain with, blame, or fear.

The subtext is about agency. Calling wine "devil" externalizes desire, letting the drinker cast himself as victim of an intruder rather than author of his own excess. Shakespeare knows the convenience of that story, which is why the diction is both elevated and accusatory. The line performs the intoxicated mind: grandiose in address, absolutist in judgment, desperate for a clean label to contain a messy appetite.

Contextually, Shakespeare is writing in a culture where alehouses are social glue and public anxiety, where sermons and statutes police drunkenness even as the economy profits from it. Onstage, the joke lands because its true: alcohol is ordinary, invisible, everywhere - and it only becomes "devil" after it has already done its work.