XCIV
1. They that have power to hurt, and will do none,
2. That do not do the thing they most do show,
3. Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
4. Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow;
5. They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces,
6. And husband nature’s riches from expense;
7. They are the lords and owners of their faces,
8. Others, but stewards of their excellence.
9. The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,
10. Though to itself, it only live and die,
11. But if that flower with base infection meet,
12. The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
13. For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
14. Lilies that fester, smell far worse than weeds.
Billy Shakespeare ne Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.
“The strange, difficult, contradictory man who emerges as the real Shakespeare, Edward
de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, is not just plausible but fascinating and wholly believable.”
David McCullough, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian,
author of Truman and John Adams.