Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!”
- Source
- Marmion
- Date
- 1808
Meaning of “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, When…”
Scott’s narrator condenses Marmion’s worsening predicament into a warning that one deception tends to require further concealment and creates increasingly complex consequences.
Where does it come from?
Marmion, Canto VI, stanza XVII, Project Gutenberg #4010, transcribed from the 1888 Cassell & Company edition. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!” is the narrator’s moral comment as Marmion realizes that his own intrigue is closing around him. It remains narrative commentary inside Scott’s historical romance in verse rather than a standalone empirical rule.