Who shall give a lover any law

“Who shall give a lover any law?” is a memorable expression about the supposed sovereignty of love. Its force lies in converting a question of conduct into a question of jurisdiction: if love itself is the governing law, then the lover appears answerable to a higher authority than the rules imposed by society, nature, or human institutions. The expression is therefore both a defense of passion and a compact statement of the moral danger that passion may claim exemption from judgment.

Wording and Meaning

The line is introduced as an old saying attributed to a learned authority: “Who shall give a lover any law”? Its rhetorical form matters. Rather than asserting openly that lovers may do anything, it asks who possesses the right to legislate for them. The question implies that love resists external regulation, and the surrounding explanation makes the implication explicit: love is described as a law greater than all laws that Nature gives to earthly human beings.

The expression does not define love as merely an emotion. It gives love institutional and almost sovereign status. A lover is imagined as living under a private jurisdiction whose commands can override public decrees. That metaphor makes the phrase powerful because it compresses feeling, authority, obedience, and transgression into one sentence. It also leaves the ethical problem unresolved: a law normally binds and disciplines, but this law is invoked to excuse the breaking of other laws.

The Argument Around the Saying

The saying appears in an argument about whether a man may be blamed for loving a woman. The speaker asks the other party to suppose that the love existed before the present dispute, then invokes the maxim as a principle that limits ordinary judgment. The claim is not that every desire is admirable; it is that love possesses a force against which deliberate resistance may fail.

The argument proceeds from authority to universality. Human beings of every social class break decrees and statutes for love every day, the speaker says. Love is therefore presented not as an eccentric weakness belonging to one individual, but as a recurring human power that crosses rank and circumstance. This broad claim strengthens the maxim rhetorically: what might otherwise look like a personal excuse is made to appear an established feature of human behavior.

The speaker then makes the principle harsher. A man must love despite himself, and he cannot escape even when death may be the price. The possible object of this compulsion may be a maiden, a widow, or a wife, so the maxim is not restricted to socially uncomplicated courtship. By naming these different conditions, the passage emphasizes that the force of love is said to persist despite the legal and moral complications attached to the beloved’s status.

Law, Desire, and Responsibility

The expression creates a conflict between formal law and the law claimed by passion. In the wider world of the poem, authority is represented by figures such as The Sergeant of the Law, whose wisdom and prudence associate legal knowledge with public order. Against that formal sphere, the maxim proposes an unruly private sovereignty. The contrast does not simply praise one system and condemn the other; it dramatizes the difficulty of judging actions produced by competing forms of obligation.

As a speech act, the line does more than describe lovers. It attempts to alter the terms on which a lover is judged. Once love is called law, an act that would ordinarily be treated as disobedience can be reframed as compliance with another authority. The phrase thus has a persuasive purpose: it seeks sympathy for the lover by presenting passion as compulsion rather than free choice. Yet the surrounding statement that a man loves “despite himself” also creates an uneasy tension between responsibility and helplessness. If love is irresistible, the lover may claim diminished agency; if it is a law, however, obedience remains a form of action.

The phrase consequently cannot be reduced to a romantic endorsement. It carries an implicit warning about legal pluralism within intimate life. Public rules, natural order, social custom, and the lover’s private vow may all claim authority at once. The maxim names the lover’s preferred rule, but it does not prove that this rule is legitimate to anyone outside the passion that sustains it.

Recurrence and Literary Function

The expression belongs to a larger pattern in which promises, commands, prayers, curses, and declarations can produce practical consequences. In one scene, Theseus requires Palamon and Arcite to swear that they will no longer threaten his land or make war against him. In another, Dorigen speaks playfully to Aurelius about granting him her love, while her marriage bond remains decisive. These surrounding situations make the maxim’s logic especially resonant: spoken commitments and emotional claims repeatedly compete with established obligations.

The line also illuminates the poem’s treatment of love as a force that crosses boundaries. It can oppose law, challenge prudence, and drive people toward choices whose consequences they cannot fully control. The expression’s apparent universality is part of its seduction. By insisting that lovers everywhere behave in this way, the speaker transforms an individual conflict into a general human condition, inviting the audience to recognize the temptation even while questioning the excuse.

Significance

“Who shall give a lover any law?” endures because it captures a contradiction at the center of courtly love: love is imagined as a discipline demanding total obedience, yet it is also used to justify disobedience to every competing discipline. The line gives passion the dignity of law while preserving its volatility. Its question remains unanswered because the poem’s moral world contains several legitimate authorities, and love cannot simply erase them by naming itself sovereign.

The expression therefore functions as a maxim, an argument, and a provocation. It offers lovers a language of compulsion and dignity, but it also exposes the rhetorical maneuver by which desire seeks immunity from judgment. Its deepest significance lies in that double movement: love may rule the lover with the force of law, yet the claim that it rules above law remains something that must be argued, defended, and morally tested.