"There's no hate lost between us"
About this Quote
Middleton’s line lands like a polite bow with a knife tucked in the sleeve. “There’s no hate lost between us” borrows the shape of a familiar social reassurance (“no love lost”) and flips it into something colder: not only is there hatred, it’s efficient, accounted for, and mutually understood. The joke is grammatical, but the sting is moral. Hate isn’t an accident here; it’s an arrangement.
The phrase “lost” does heavy lifting. Love, in the conventional idiom, can be misplaced, squandered, allowed to fade through neglect. Middleton implies the opposite: their animus has been carefully preserved. Nothing has dissipated into forgetfulness or softened into tolerance. It’s a compact between enemies who know exactly where they stand. That’s the subtext that makes it feel modern: the weaponized civility of people who can share a room, trade compliments, and still keep the feud fully charged.
Context matters. Middleton writes in the early 17th-century world of city comedy and courtly maneuvering, where reputation is currency and speech is strategy. Characters survive by mastering the art of saying two things at once. In that environment, hatred isn’t just an emotion; it’s a social posture, a negotiated public fact. The line suggests a relationship defined less by explosive conflict than by steady antagonism, the kind that can be maintained indefinitely because it’s useful. It works because it refuses melodrama. Instead of declaring “I hate you,” it offers the cooler, deadlier claim: we’ve both invested in this, and neither of us is taking a loss.
The phrase “lost” does heavy lifting. Love, in the conventional idiom, can be misplaced, squandered, allowed to fade through neglect. Middleton implies the opposite: their animus has been carefully preserved. Nothing has dissipated into forgetfulness or softened into tolerance. It’s a compact between enemies who know exactly where they stand. That’s the subtext that makes it feel modern: the weaponized civility of people who can share a room, trade compliments, and still keep the feud fully charged.
Context matters. Middleton writes in the early 17th-century world of city comedy and courtly maneuvering, where reputation is currency and speech is strategy. Characters survive by mastering the art of saying two things at once. In that environment, hatred isn’t just an emotion; it’s a social posture, a negotiated public fact. The line suggests a relationship defined less by explosive conflict than by steady antagonism, the kind that can be maintained indefinitely because it’s useful. It works because it refuses melodrama. Instead of declaring “I hate you,” it offers the cooler, deadlier claim: we’ve both invested in this, and neither of us is taking a loss.
Quote Details
| Topic | Forgiveness |
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