Aging & Wisdom Quote by William Cartwright

Cartwright’s line flatters love by staging it as a prank played on time itself: age “doth chill,” but love runs heat back into the body. The phrasing matters. “Doth chill” is almost physiological, a cold front moving through the veins, while “keeps young still” lands with a neat, insistent finality. Love isn’t merely an emotion here; it’s a force that edits the timetable, an alibi against decline and a preservative against the first fade of vitality.

As a dramatist in the Caroline era, Cartwright is writing into a culture obsessed with performance: courtly display, romantic wit, and the theater’s own ability to make people seem more alive than ordinary life allows. The couplet-like balance does stagecraft on the page. It sets up two audiences at once: the older, offered rejuvenation; the young, offered permanence. That double address is strategic, because love’s biggest selling point is not pleasure but exemption. The subtext is transactional: fall in love and you get to renegotiate what age is allowed to do to you.

There’s also a quiet defensiveness under the charm. Early modern writers routinely moralized love as dangerous or destabilizing; Cartwright counters with a socially acceptable version of love that restores order by restoring youth. In a time of plague, political anxiety, and short life expectancy (Cartwright himself died at 32), the fantasy lands harder: love as the one warmth that can’t be legislated, quarantined, or outlived.