Shakespeare quotes about summer

We’re celebrating the solstice with Shakespeare quotes about summer. Searching The Folger Shakespeare editions of the plays and poems, summer is mentioned 86 times, more than any other season.

Leave it to A Midsummer Night’s Dream to capture the season’s vibe:

How shall we beguile
The lazy time if not with some delight?
—Theseus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, scene 1

Here are a few of our favorite quotes about summer.

In Shakespeare, summer is lush, green, fragrant. It’s a time of youth, sunshine, and abundance. It is a season for merriment and love.

On the bat’s back I do fly
After summer merrily.
—Ariel, The Tempest, Act V, scene 1

But with the word “The time will bring on summer,”
When briers shall have leaves as well as thorns
And be as sweet as sharp.
—Helen, All’s Well That Ends Well, Act IV, scene 4

As a fair day in summer, wondrous fair.
—Pericles, Pericles, Act II, scene 5

My lovely Aaron, wherefore look’st thou sad,
When everything doth make a gleeful boast?
The birds chant melody on every bush,
The snakes lies rollèd in the cheerful sun,
The green leaves quiver with the cooling wind
And make a checkered shadow on the ground.
—Tamora, Titus Andronicus, Act II, scene 3 

This bud of love, by summer’s ripening breath,
May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet.
—Juliet, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, scene 2

Out of this wood do not desire to go.
Thou shalt remain here whether thou wilt or no.
I am a spirit of no common rate.
The summer still doth tend upon my state,
And I do love thee. Therefore go with me.
—Titania, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, scene 1

The horn, I say. Farewell.
Take heed, have open eye, for thieves do foot by night.
Take heed, ere summer comes or cuckoo birds do sing.
—Pistol, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act II, scene 1

Even out of season, summer represents light, joy, and possibility.

Why tender’st thou that paper to me with
A look untender? If ’t be summer news,
Smile to ’t before; if winterly, thou need’st
But keep that count’nance still.
—Imogen, Cymbeline, Act III, scene 4

O Westmoreland, thou art a summer bird,
Which ever in the haunch of winter sings
The lifting up of day.
—King, Henry IV, Part 2, Act IV, scene 3

Thus sometimes hath the brightest day a cloud,
And after summer evermore succeeds
Barren winter, with his wrathful nipping cold;
So cares and joys abound, as seasons fleet.
—Gloucester, Henry IV, Part 2, Act II, scene 4

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York,
And all the clouds that loured upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
—Richard III, Act III, scene 1

The fair-eyed maids shall weep our banishments
And in their songs curse ever-blinded Fortune
Till she for shame see what a wrong she has done
To youth and nature. This is all our world.
We shall know nothing here but one another,
Hear nothing but the clock that tells our woes.
The vine shall grow, but we shall never see it;
Summer shall come, and with her all delights,
But dead-cold winter must inhabit here still.
—Arcite, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Act II, scene 2

Summer shines most brightly in Shakespeare’s Sonnets where it appears in 13 separate sonnets, including:

Sonnet 5

“The first of two linked sonnets, the poet compares the young man to summer and its flowers, doomed to be destroyed by winter,” says The Folger Shakespeare of Sonnet 5. “Even though summer inevitably dies, he argues, its flowers can be distilled into perfume. The beauty of the flowers and thereby the essence of summer are thus preserved.”

Those hours that with gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell
Will play the tyrants to the very same
And that unfair which fairly doth excel;
For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter and confounds him there,
Sap checked with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o’er-snowed and bareness everywhere.
Then, were not summer’s distillation left
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.
But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

Sonnet 18

Perhaps Shakespeare’s best-known mention of summer is in Sonnet 18 which begins “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” The Folger Shakespeare writes: “In a radical departure from the previous sonnets, the young man’s beauty, here more perfect even than a day in summer, is not threatened by Time or Death, since he will live in perfection forever in the poet’s verses.”

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Saving this quote for August and the dog days of summer.

For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.
—Benvolio, Romeo and Juliet, Act III, scene 1