What Love is Like

Love is like a lamb, and love is like a lion;

Fly from love he fights; fight, then does he fly on.

Love is all on fire, and yet is ever freezing;

Love is much on winning, yet is more in leesing[2]

Love is ever sick, and yet is never dying;

Love is ever true, and yet is ever lying.

Love does doat in liking, and is mad in loathing

Love indeed is everything, yet indeed is nothing.[1]

-       Thomas Middleton[3]

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[1] i.e. losing

[2] This is a song from Act II, Scene II of Middleton’s 1602 play Blurt, Master Constable.

[3] Thomas Middleton was born in London in 1580, son of a master bricklayer. He was educated first at Queen’s College, Oxford, and was then admitted at Gray’s Inn in 1593. He published three volumes of verse by 1600, and it is believed that he had already begun to write for the stage at that time. Certainly he was a working playwright by 1602, when he is mentioned in Henslowe’s Diary, and his earliest surviving independent play, Blurt, Master Constable (1602) was printed.
         

Middleton was an industrious, prolific author, writing for both Boys of St. Paul’s and the Admiral’s Men. His citizen comedies, written for boys’ companies between 1602 and 1607, include A Mad World, My Masters  (c.1605), A Trick to Catch the Old One  (c.1605) and Michaelmas Term  (c.1606). He collaborated with Dekker on three comedies. For the adult companies, he also wrote his masterpiece, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1611). These comedies expose bourgeois vice in contemporary London in a satiric tone. From 1613 on, Middleton wrote many City of London pageants for the Lord Mayor, and served as City Chronologer from 1620 until his death in 1627. He also continued to write plays.
         

Middleton’s patriotic drama, A Game at Chess (1624), unprecedentedly successful, was closed after nine performances due to its inflammatory anti-Spanish content and the Spanish Ambassador’s outrage. The writer and the actors were reprimanded and fined. One of Middleton’s last plays, Women Beware Women  (c.1625), was a tragedy in which the final “slaughter” scene verged on comedy, a matter which has persuaded some critics that Middleton was also the author of The Revenger’s Tragedy  (1607).  Middleton died of natural causes at Newington Butts and was buried there in 1627.  (Source: English Renaissance Drama at luminarium.org)