The thought is Shakespeare’s; the wording is not. In King John (Act 4, Scene 2) the Earl of Salisbury calls a needless second coronation as wasteful as “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily ↗” — he gilds the gold and paints the lily, two separate acts of excess. “Gild the lily” takes the verb from one clause and the flower from the other, producing a phrase that appears nowhere in Shakespeare.
“Gild the lily” Shakespeare wrote "to gild refined gold, to paint the lily" — King John, Act 4, Scene 2, first printed in the 1623 First Folio. "Gild the lily" is a later misquotation; the earliest example Phrase Finder can locate is an 1895 American newspaper. Verbatim: “Therefore, to be possess'd with double pomp, To guard a title that was rich before, To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, To throw a perfume on the violet, To smooth the ice, or add another hue Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.”
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Provenance
The genuine line in King John
Work
King John
Passage
Act 4, Scene 2 — spoken by the Earl of Salisbury
First printed
First Folio, 1623 (no earlier quarto)
Actual words
“to gild refined gold, to paint the lily”
Therefore, to be possess’d with double pomp, To guard a title that was rich before, To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, To throw a perfume on the violet, To smooth the ice, or add another hue Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.
King John, Act 4, Scene 2
Salisbury attacking King John’s needless second coronation. Note the two separate images: one gilds refined gold, the other paints the lily.
Shakespeare’s actual line belongs to Salisbury in King John, Act 4, Scene 2: the Folger Shakespeare text ↗ prints it at line 1711 as “To gild refinèd gold, to paint the lily.”
Project Gutenberg’s King John ↗ gives the same reading — “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily” — and confirms Salisbury as the speaker in Act IV, Scene 2. Neither text contains “gild the lily.”
The Grammarphobia Blog ↗ notes that the OED enters the idiom as “to paint (or to gild) the lily,” and reports 4.6 million web hits for “gild the lily” against 108,000 for Shakespeare’s wording.
The earliest use Phrase Finder ↗ can locate is American, not Elizabethan: the Newark Daily Advocate in 1895 — “One may gild the lily and paint the rose” — which moves “gild” onto the lily and hands “paint” to a flower Shakespeare never mentioned.
✓Public domain
The genuine passage comes from King John, first printed in the 1623 First Folio ↗ — centuries before 1931 and firmly in the public domain, as are the 1895 newspaper and 1908 Wharton uses cited here. The idiom “gild the lily” is itself an anonymous common-usage phrase with no identifiable author or rights holder.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Why “gild the lily” isn’t Shakespeare
“Gild the lily” is one of the most-quoted lines Shakespeare never wrote. It is a single sentence of King John with its parts rearranged.
✕
The wordingA garbled Shakespeare misquotation
Salisbury’s text is “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily” — the gold is gilded, the lily painted. The idiom moves “gild” onto the lily, giving a phrase found nowhere in the plays; the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust ↗ calls it “a slight misquote of his words.”
✓
The ideaWilliam Shakespeare genuine
The thought — that ornamenting what is already perfect is “wasteful and ridiculous excess” — is his, from this same speech in King John, Act 4, Scene 2 ↗. Only the phrasing is borrowed.
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The datingLater English usage usage
Oxford University Press ↗ dates the first documented “gilding of the lily” to the Manchester Guardian Weekly of September 1928. That dictionary record understates the phrase’s age: Wiktionary ↗ records Edith Wharton’s “gilded the lily” in A Motor-Flight Through France (1908), and Phrase Finder ↗ finds an American newspaper using it in 1895.
✓Shakespeare wrote “to paint the lily”; “gild the lily” is a later English idiom that overtook it — “a slight misquote of his words,” as the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust ↗ puts it.
Context
How a mis-remembering became standard English
Salisbury’s speech stacks up images of pointless ornament: gilding gold that is already refined, painting a lily that is already white, perfuming a violet, smoothing ice, adding a hue to the rainbow. Each is a separate absurdity, and the whole list lands on a verdict — “wasteful and ridiculous excess.” Nothing in it gilds a lily.
In later retelling the two most vivid images fused. The verb slid one clause to the right, the list collapsed into a single phrase, and the mongrel version won: “gild the lily” is now ordinary English, printed by writers as careful as Edith Wharton, while Shakespeare’s own “paint the lily” can sound to modern ears like the mistake. It is an unusual case of a misquotation all but displacing its original — though the OED still leads with Shakespeare’s verb.
He gilded the gold and painted the lily. Posterity gilded the lily.
Why the wrong version stuck
Nobody can prove why the swap took hold, and the researchers who have looked are candid about that. The Grammarphobia Blog ↗ offers a guess and labels it one: the assonance of the vowels and the shared l of “gild” and “lily” simply make the wrong version easier to say and remember than the right one. What is not in doubt is the scale of the takeover — the same post reports 4.6 million web hits for “gild the lily” against 108,000 for “paint the lily,” many of the latter being attempts to correct the error.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was an English playwright and poet, and the most-quoted writer in the language — which is precisely why so many phrases he never wrote get filed under his name. King John was written in the mid-1590s (the Oxford Shakespeare editors settle on 1596) and was first printed in the 1623 First Folio, having never appeared as a quarto. Salisbury’s speech in Act 4 gave English a durable idiom — in a form Shakespeare himself never used.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
King John, Act 4, Scene 2 (First Folio, 1623)
William Shakespeare, “The Life and Death of King John,” Act 4, Scene 2, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies [First Folio] (London, 1623). The line reads “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily” — not “gild the lily.”
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Gild the lily’?” Last verified 29 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/gild-the-lily/