"There was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass"
About this Quote
Vanity gets a dirty little punchline here: even the "fair woman" cant resist rehearsing herself for an audience of one. Shakespeare takes a courtly compliment (beauty) and swivels it into a comic inevitability (performance). "Never yet" is the trapdoor. It pretends to offer a grand truth, then lands on something petty and bodily: making "mouths" at a mirror, puckering, posing, testing angles. The phrase is deliberately unglamorous, almost infantile, which is exactly the point. Idealized femininity is demoted from ethereal virtue to practiced effect.
The subtext is less about women being frivolous than about beauty as labor and spectacle. A "glass" isnt just a mirror; in Shakespeare's world it is a device of self-scrutiny and self-invention. The line suggests that attractiveness is not a static fact but a routine, a set of gestures refined through repetition. It also carries a sly anxiety: if beauty is something you can rehearse, it is also something that can fail, fade, or be faked. Compliment and suspicion travel together.
Contextually, this lands in a culture obsessed with appearance, rank, and court performance, where looking the part could be as consequential as being the part. Shakespeare's wit works because it catches the audience recognizing the human behavior underneath the poetic ideal: the mirror is where romance meets self-consciousness, where desire is shaped before it is offered.
The subtext is less about women being frivolous than about beauty as labor and spectacle. A "glass" isnt just a mirror; in Shakespeare's world it is a device of self-scrutiny and self-invention. The line suggests that attractiveness is not a static fact but a routine, a set of gestures refined through repetition. It also carries a sly anxiety: if beauty is something you can rehearse, it is also something that can fail, fade, or be faked. Compliment and suspicion travel together.
Contextually, this lands in a culture obsessed with appearance, rank, and court performance, where looking the part could be as consequential as being the part. Shakespeare's wit works because it catches the audience recognizing the human behavior underneath the poetic ideal: the mirror is where romance meets self-consciousness, where desire is shaped before it is offered.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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