It is the opening line of The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, spoken by Richard, Duke of Gloucester — and it is genuine: the wording appears in the 1597 first quarto and again in the 1623 First Folio. The catch is that the sentence does not end there. It runs on into “Made glorious summer by this son of York,” which reverses the gloom almost everyone hears in the first line alone.
“Now is the winter of our discontent” William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, act 1, scene 1, lines 1–2 (first printed 1597). Via Quotle.info Verbatim: “Now is the winter of our discontent, / Made glorious summer by this son of York”
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Provenance
The source
Work
The Tragedy of King Richard the Third
Passage
Act 1, scene 1, lines 1–2 — opening soliloquy of Richard, Duke of Gloucester
First printed
First quarto, London: Valentine Sims for Andrew Wise, 1597; again in the First Folio, 1623
Text quoted
Folger Shakespeare Library edition (based on the 1623 First Folio)
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. Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths, Our bruisèd arms hung up for monuments, Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings, Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Opening 8 lines
The play was written c. 1592–1594 and entered in the Stationers’ Register on 20 October 1597 by the bookseller Andrew Wise, who published the first quarto later that year; the Folio version followed in 1623 ↗.
The 1623 First Folio prints: “NOw is the Winter of our Discontent, / Made glorious Summer by this Son of Yorke:” — Folio 1 transcription ↗. The line has therefore been in print, in this wording, for more than four centuries.
Modern editors split on the second line. The Folger edition is based on the First Folio ↗ and keeps “son of York”; the more familiar “sun of York” is an editorial choice that makes the heraldic pun explicit.
✓Public domain
The line was first printed in the 1597 first quarto and again in the 1623 First Folio — centuries before the 1931 US public-domain threshold — and the play is distributed as a free public-domain text by Project Gutenberg ↗. Individual modern editions carry their own editorial apparatus, but the wording of this line is identical in the earliest printings.
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
What actually goes wrong with this quote
Nobody doubts the author. What gets misattributed here is the meaning — and, on quotation sites, the second line’s spelling.
✕
MeaningAlmost everyone who quotes the first line alone inverted
Standing by itself the line sounds like a lament, as though we are in the thick of the misery. Shakespeare’s sentence says the opposite: Richard is reporting that the period of misery has been made into a glorious happy summer by the House of York’s victory — as set out in this reading of the speech ↗.
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WordingQuotation sites and many modern editions sun vs son
The familiar “made glorious summer by this sun of York” is a modernisation. The 1597 quarto sets “this sonne of Yorke” ↗ and the 1623 Folio “this Son of Yorke.” Both spellings existed in period printing and the two words were homophones, so the copy does not settle the reading: Edward IV was literally the eldest surviving son of Richard, 3rd Duke of York ↗, and the Yorkist badge was a sun in splendour ↗. The pun runs on the homophone plus the badge, not on a failure of spelling.
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Authorship of the phraseJohn Steinbeck borrowed title
The name given to the UK strike wave of late September 1978 to February 1979 was taken from this opening line ↗, and is usually credited to Sun editor Larry Lamb — though the same source notes earlier use in a 1978 Downing Street note.
✓The words are Shakespeare’s, and they have been in print since 1597 ↗. Only the sentence’s direction has been lost: the winter is the part that has just ended.
Context
Why it matters
Richard III opens with a man walking on alone and telling the audience, more or less, that everything is fine now. The Yorkists have won, his brother Edward sits on the throne, and the long miserable war is over — that is what “the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer” is actually reporting. The joke, and the engine of the whole play, is that Richard finds peace unbearable and spends the rest of the speech deciding to wreck it.
So the line has spent more than four centuries being deployed to mean its opposite. Steinbeck borrowed it for a book jacket in 1961, British politics turned it into the label for a strike wave, and news writers still reach for it whenever things look bleak. A Royal Holloway Shakespearean has argued that the misuse costs us the sharper warning in the play ↗ — about a ruler who manufactures chaos because calm leaves him nothing to do.
The winter is the part that just ended.
The son/sun crux, briefly
Editions agree on the first line and part company on the second. The 1597 quarto sets “this sonne of Yorke” and the 1623 Folio “this Son of Yorke.” Editors who print “sun” are making the heraldic reading explicit; editors who print “son” are following the copy, since Edward was literally a son of the Duke of York.
c. 1564 – 1616 · English playwright, poet and actor
William Shakespeare (c. 23 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor, baptised at Stratford-upon-Avon on 26 April 1564. Richard III, written around 1592–1594, is one of his early history plays, and its opening soliloquy is among the most quoted passages in English — and among the most frequently quoted against its own meaning. He is also the single biggest magnet for invented quotations online, which makes the genuinely sourced lines worth pinning down precisely.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, act 1, scene 1, lines 1–2. First printed in The Tragedy of King Richard the third (London: Valentine Sims for Andrew Wise, 1597); also in the First Folio, 1623. Text as given in the Folger Shakespeare Library edition, which follows the Folio.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Now is the winter of our discontent’?” Last verified 29 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/now-is-the-winter-of-our-discontent/