Love Quote by Thomas Dekker

Dekker’s line snaps like a trap: love isn’t described, it’s sentenced. In eight words he stages the whole early modern bargain - desire as salvation and as punishment - and he does it with the blunt machinery of the playhouse: exclamation, repetition, stark opposites. “What a” is doing double duty, sounding like awe and like disbelief, the voice of someone watching their own emotions get the better of them. The pivot from “heaven” to “hell” is so fast it feels like a costume change in full view of the audience, reminding us that the same force can sanctify and scorch without warning.

As a dramatist working in London’s commercial theaters, Dekker knew love wasn’t a private diary subject; it was public spectacle with real stakes. Courtship could mean money, reputation, infection, marriage law, pregnancy, social mobility - or ruin. That’s the subtext: love as an engine that drags bodies through institutions. “Heaven” hints at the era’s religious vocabulary, where longing borrows the language of grace. “Hell” snaps it back to the street: jealousy, betrayal, shame, the hangover after idealization.

The line’s intent is not to reconcile the contradiction but to weaponize it. Dekker compresses the emotional whiplash his audiences recognized: love sells transcendent meaning, then invoices you in suffering. It’s a miniature tragedy and a miniature joke, depending on who’s speaking it - which is exactly why it works onstage.