Love Quote by Edward Dyer

A neat little act of democratic sabotage, slipped into a line that sounds like a proverb. Edward Dyer’s “And love is love in beggars and in kings” refuses the era’s favorite fiction: that rank changes the substance of human feeling. The repetition is the trick. “Love is love” isn’t decorative; it’s a verbal leveling device, stripping away the adjectives society tries to pin on desire - noble, base, courtly, common - and insisting the core experience won’t cooperate.

Dyer is writing from within a culture obsessed with hierarchy and performance, where love was often staged as etiquette: Petrarchan devotion, courtly yearning, marriages as alliances. Against that backdrop, the line works like a pin to a balloon. It implies that the rituals of class may govern who gets to declare love publicly, but they don’t govern what love actually does to a body and mind. Beggars and kings live in different rooms, but the same weather moves through them.

There’s also a quiet political edge. If love is the same across classes, then the moral logic used to justify unequal treatment starts to look shakier. Dyer doesn’t rant; he offers a calm equivalence that sounds self-evident, which is precisely why it lands. The line flatters no one. It denies kings the comfort of exceptionalism and refuses to romanticize poverty as purer feeling. Love isn’t elevated by a crown or ennobled by hardship. It just is - inconveniently, persistently human.