When my love sweares that she is made of truth,
I do beleeue her (though I know she lies)
That she might thinke me some vntutor’d youth,
Vnskilful in the worlds false forgeries.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinkes me young,
Although I know my yeares be past the best :
I smiling, credite her false speaking tounge,
Outfacing faults in loue, with loues ill rest.
But wherefore sayes my loue that she is young ?
And wherefore say not I that I am old :
O, Loues best habit’s in a soothing toung,
And Age in loue, loues not to haue yeares told.
Therefore I’le lye with Loue, and loue with me,
Since that our faultes in louve thus smother’d be.
—William Shakespeare, Sonnet cxxxviii first published in The Passionate Pilgrim (1599)
Listen to John Dowland’s Can She Excuse My Wrongs from the First Booke of Songes (1597) in a performance by Gérard Lesne and the Ensemble Orlando Gibbons, and then a guitar performance of his Melancholy Galliard and an Allemande by Jamie Andreas on a modern guitar:
