Daily Inspiration Quote by William Shakespeare

Even virtue catches strays. Shakespeare’s line lands with the cold snap of recognition: moral goodness isn’t armor; it’s a target with better PR. “Scapes not” has the fatalistic certainty of a verdict, while “calumnious strokes” turns slander into blunt-force violence. The phrasing matters. Calumny isn’t just gossip drifting through a court corridor; it’s an assault that leaves bruises on reputation, and reputation in Shakespeare is often indistinguishable from life itself.

The intent is less to lament virtue than to puncture the comforting fantasy that decency guarantees safety. Shakespeare writes in a world where public standing is currency, and accusation is a weapon anyone can wield. The line’s subtext is pragmatic, even paranoid: if the innocent can be smeared, then the social order is not governed by truth but by narrative control. That’s a recurring Shakespearean anxiety, from Othello’s ruin by insinuation to the many plots where whispers outrun evidence and characters are tried in the court of hearsay.

Contextually, the phrase fits an early modern culture of surveillance and performance: honor codes, religious conflict, and political volatility made “being seen” as important as being good. Shakespeare also knows the audience’s appetite for moral comeuppance and flips it: the virtuous don’t always get rewarded; they often get accused. The line works because it’s both a warning and a diagnosis of how societies police themselves: not by measuring virtue, but by managing suspicion.