The Decay of Lying and Other Essays by Oscar Wilde

Author:Oscar Wilde
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2010-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

and ends the sonnet by congratulating himself on the mean state of him he so adored:

Then happy I, that love and am beloved,

Where I may not remove nor be removed.

This sonnet Cyril declared would be quite unintelligible if we fancied that it was addressed to either the Earl of Pembroke or the Earl of Southampton, both of whom were men of the highest position in England and fully entitled to be called “great princes”; and he in corroboration of his view read me Sonnets cxxiv and cxxv, in which Shakespeare tells us that his love is not “the child of the state”, that it “suffers not in smiling pomp”, but is “builded far from accident”. I listened with a good deal of interest, for I don’t think the point had ever been made before; but what followed was still more curious, and seemed to me at the time to dispose entirely of Pembroke’s claim. We know from Meres that the Sonnets had been written before 1598, and Sonnet civ informs us that Shakespeare’s friendship for Mr W. H. had been already in existence for three years. Now Lord Pembroke, who was born in 1580, did not come to London till he was eighteen years of age, that is to say till 1598, and Shakespeare’s acquaintance with Mr W. H. must have begun in 1594, or at the latest in 1595. Shakespeare, accordingly, could not have known Lord Pembroke until after the Sonnets had been written.

‘Cyril pointed out also that Pembroke’s father did not die until 1601; whereas it was evident from the line,

You had a father, let your son say so,

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