Meaning & Analysis
The proverb states that Fortune—often personified as a woman—is consistent only in her inconsistency, meaning she is perpetually changeable and never reliable.
Insights
Mutability of Fate
Fortune is portrayed as inherently changeable; the only predictable quality is her unpredictability. This captures the experience of life’s continual ups and downs, warning that stability in external circumstances is an illusion.
The Paradox of Constancy
The proverb uses paradox to highlight that what appears to be reliable is, in fact, unreliability itself. It suggests that human attempts to depend on luck, wealth, or favor are inevitably frustrated by their shifting nature.
Gendered Symbolism
By comparing Fortune (and sometimes women) to inconstancy, the proverb reflects historical cultural stereotypes about feminine fickleness—revealing more about social attitudes than intrinsic truths about gender or fate.
Historical Symbolism
Since antiquity, Fortune has been depicted as a capricious goddess, her wheel ever-turning. Early modern literature frequently conflated Fortune’s inconstancy with stereotyped views of women, as seen in both the proverb and its literary citations.
Literary and Cultural Resonance
Writers such as Marlowe, Lodge, and Peele exploit this image to comment on the instability of favor, love, and prosperity. The recurring phrase in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama underscores how the era grappled with anxieties about mutability in both fortune and personal relationships.
Psychological Dimensions
The proverb’s paradoxical comfort is its warning: by expecting and accepting change as the only constant, individuals may cultivate resilience and lessen disappointment in the face of life’s reversals.
Rhetorical Devices
Paradox
The statement that constancy exists only in inconstancy is a paradox, sharpening the proverb’s message and prompting reflection on the nature of reliability and change.
Personification
Fortune is personified as a woman, making the abstract idea of fate emotionally vivid and memorable. This personification is reinforced by comparing her to mutable elements such as the wind.
Antithesis
The juxtaposition of 'constant' and 'inconstancy' heightens the proverb’s rhetorical power, embodying the clash between human desire for order and the reality of change.
Transcription
Quotations
In nothing Fortune constant is, save in inconstancie.
A constant man I affirme him constantly, For he is constant in inconstancy.
[wealth] is constant in nothing but inconstancie.
[Women] Constant in naught, but in inconstancie.
Constant in nothing but inconstancie, [she] thought to make them myrrours of her mutabilitie.
But that proud Fortune . . Will now retain her old inconstancy.
O fortune constant in vnconstancie!
Soe the vncertaine light and wilde fowle fortune variable, whoe onlie in vnconstancie doth shewe herself most stable.
Mistresses in dissembling, only constant in unconstancy.
Constant in nought, but in vnconstancie.
By my Hollidam, juglers, constant in nothing but Inconstancy, thats the French Merchandize.
The uncertain people, Constant to nothing but inconstancy.
Cross References
- See OTTO, no. 698
- T. 114, p. 107.
- W449 You may as well turn the wind as a woman.
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
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