Who's quote is this William Blake or William Shakespeare?

Question

“Love to faults is always blind, always is to joy inclined. Lawless, winged, and unconfined, and breaks all chains from every mind.” I know W. Blake has a poem with this line in it but a lot of web sites I've looked at said that Shakespeare said the quote. Could someone please clarify for me who it belongs to?

Answer 1

I'm almost certain it's Blake, for a number of reasons.

A search in the Shakespeare search engine, which searches the full text of Shakespeare's works, retrieves no hits.

Shakespeare's preferred meter was iambic pentamater. This is trochaic tetrameter. An iamb is a metrical foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one; a trochee is the reverse, consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one. Pentameter has five beats to the line; tetrameter has four beats to the line.  Compare:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

to:

Tyger, tyger burning bright.

The use of the word "lawless" to mean "free" is more characteristic of the romantic poets than it is of Shakespeare.  To Shakespeare, "lawless" meant rebellious, chaotic, dangerous.  I don't think he ever used it in an approving sense, and a search for "lawless" on the Shakespeare search engine confirms this suspicion.  He was unlikely to use it to describe love.

Finally, Blake knew and admired Shakespeare's work.  Blake was primarily a printer, and was accustomed to illustrating the works of others -- including the Bible, Milton, and Dante.  When working with someone else's text he never pretended to be anything other than the illustrator.  Blake had his faults no doubt -- few indeed if you ask me -- but plagiarism was not one of them.  The line appears in one of his poems, and it is unlikely that it was stolen directly from Shakespeare.

Answer 2

Shakespeare.

Two of my favourite writers.

Answer 3

William Shakespeare.