“It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves”
Google currently retrieves 33,800 hitsfor this exact phrase. However, I can’t find one that specifies the source.
Is this just a misquote of the actual text? I know there is a similar quote in Julius Caesar which goes:
*“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” *
It is possible that he said similar things in two different works. Also, there are variant texts of the same work. It is thus possible that it is not a misquote but an accurate quote from a different work.
I searched using Open Source Shakespeare, and “It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves” is not present in any of Shakespeare’s works. It’s a clumsy paraphrase of the quote from Julius Caesar that you mentioned.
Shakespeare scholar here. Shakespeare most definitely did not write the lines you quote, as any Shakespeare concordance will tell you. It’s a garbled version of the lines in JC.
Garbled Shakespeare was common even in his lifetime, witness the ‘bad’ quarto of Hamlet, pirated and rushed to the printers in 1603. (Shakespeare’s company quickly had an authorized version printed (Q2), twice as long as the pirate and ungarbled.
Here’s the beginning of the ‘To be or not to be’ speech as printed in Q1, the bad quarto.
As I said, this stuff has been around a long time.
The botched version is not in iambic pentameter, and the only characters in the plays who did not speak in iambic pentameter were characters like the rustics in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who put on the play Pyramus and Thisby. This doesn’t sound like something they’d say.
If you want to try to track down the origin, see if you can find a reference from before 1998; if you can’t then watch the movie Shakespeare in Love, and see if it’s there. One of the jokes in SIL was that people were always saying thing which Shakespeare found quote-worthy, but adapted them, improved the imagery, brevity, and of course, added the meter. There are a lot of fake proto-Shakespearian lines in the movie.
It really feels that way. There’s a theory that this version of the play was cobbled together from memory by the actor who played Marcellus (the guy who brings Horatio to the watch at the beginning, then goes with him to tell Hamlet about the ghost) because Marcellus’ lines are suspiciously more accurate than most of the rest of the text. I assume that if that actor did this without permission, he had trouble getting work after that.
I was once in a production of *Measure for Measure *in high school (not a high school production-- I just happened to be in high school). Anyway, the character Claudio has a speech that begins “To die, and to go we know not where, to lie in cold obstruction, and to rot!” One night, even though it was the fourth or fifth night, he drew a complete blank on the speech, and what came out of his mouth was “To die, and to boldly go where no man has gone before!” he got back on track after that, but I’m sure at least one person said “So that’s where Roddenberry got that from.”
The quote was often truncated to “The fault is not in our stars but in ourselves” which was then mangled, probably on tumblr, further into what you see. The original quote gained new life after being used by John Green in the title of his novel “The Fault in our Stars”. The book (and movie) was especially popular with young readers.