SOURCE: “Money and Love in Shakespeare's Sonnets,” in Bucknell Review, Vol. 17, No. 3, December, 1969, pp. 91-106.

[In the following essay, Goldstien explores the way in which Shakespeare associates money, love, and art in his sonnets. The critic advocates a balanced interpretation of Shakespeare's money imagery, noting that the poet uses monetary terms to both wound and to praise, and that this underscores society's ambiguous attitude toward wealth.]

This essay concerns the conjoining of money and love, and, peripherally, the conjoining of money and art in the sonnets of William Shakespeare. Nearly one-quarter of the sonnets touch in one way or another on the question of money, an all-inclusive term which I use to cover imagery of treasure, of coins, of usury, of commerce, of various other business transactions, and the like.¹ There are overlappings, of course. One would be falsifying the poem to say, for example, that sonnet 49, “Against that time, if ever that time come,” is dominated by the “audit” image, that no other image pattern meshes with it. Rosemund Tuve elucidates the problem when she points out the great difficulty inherent in assigning imagery to any one category of content.² The danger in too rigid an adherence to such a dictum, however, is the temptation to allow Shakespeare's imagery to coalesce for us, to become, in other words, too general a topic to discuss.

I do not mean to imply that no one has ever treated the money imagery in Shakespeare as money imagery, although such a statement is not too far from the truth. In a sense, the question boils down to the matter of emphasis. The scholars, like too many a general reader, have usually been one-sided in approach. Wolfgang H. Clemen, for example, calls our attention to the fact that the imagery of money in their speeches is one of the methods by which Shakespeare presents to us the crassness and greed of Goneril, Regan, and Edmund in King Lear.³ John Erskine Hankins points out the pejorative connotations of the mercenary imagery in Hamlet, and how it furthers the theme of the transitory nature of earthly things.⁴ In a sense, then, Caroline Spurgeon's approach to the question of money imagery in Shakespeare is more satisfying, but only insofar as a presentation of the frequency of occurrence of an image pattern is intellectually more honest than a presentation of a one-sided interpretation of the significance of an image pattern.⁵

It is not that Clemen and Hankins are wrong in their readings of the imagery with which they deal. It is in a larger sense that they err—the projection by omission of a false picture—for by stressing only one kind of money imagery in Shakespeare, they present us with just a partial truth, and partial truths by their very nature are often far more dangerous than lies. Hankins, for example, deals only cursorily with the money imagery of the sonnets, and he sets up by implication a tension in the sonnets between the transitoriness of gold and the permanence of love which, while it does enjoy a certain basis in fact, almost totally misrepresents the use of money imagery in the sonnets.⁶

The majority of the critics who have touched, either directly or indirectly, on Shakespeare's use of money imagery seem to have taken their cue from Ben Jonson's Volpone. “Good morning to the day; and next, my gold!” says the miserly Volpone as soon as he steps out upon the stage, “Open the shrine, that I may see my saint …” (I.i.1-2). To love gold is to love the falseness of this world. To equate gold with God, as Volpone does—“O thou son of Sol / (But brighter than thy father), let me kiss, / With adoration, thee, and every relic / Of sacred treasure, in this blessed room. / … Thou art virtue, fame, / Honour, and all things else” (I.i.10-14, 25-26)—that is perversion. And, to be sure, there does exist in Shakespeare a pronounced strain of contempt for gold, as Clemen's analysis of King Lear shows. However, it is a fact as well that Shakespeare often equates treasure with beauty and with love, and this with effect very different from the similar identifications made by Volpone. In sonnet 52, “So am I as the rich whose blessed key,” the beloved friend is the “sweet up-locked treasure” (l.2). Money and the dear friend are both objects of great value not to be looked at constantly lest the pleasure of the sight be blunted.

There is a tension in the sonnets but, with regard to the money imagery, less a tension between money and love than a tension between money exalted and money demeaned, between, in other words, money good and money evil. I submit this essay, then, as first of all an argument for a balanced interpretation of the money imagery in the sonnets, and second as a testimony to the fact that the tension between money good and money evil is not peculiar to the sonnets, nor even to Shakespeare, but, as I hope to demonstrate, an intrinsic part of the human condition insofar as that is mirrored in works of literature. I offer the reader, to this end, an examination of Shakespeare's use of money imagery in the sonnets, and several essential keys for coming to terms with that imagery and apprehending its significance. This is, of course, not a task for one man, much less one essay, and all that I can legitimately hope to do in so short a piece is to suggest starting points for further investigations of what seems to me a question of significance, the meaning of money in its varied presentations in works of literature.

There are certain general points which can be made about the contextual variation of the significance of the money imagery in the sonnets. In the early sonnets, the so-called procreation sequence, money and wealth are generally identified with the beauty of the beloved friend. Sonnet 1, “From fairest creatures we desire increase,” presents us in the opening lines with a financial term used to signify the proliferation of beauty. Money equals beauty, and the beloved friend is exhorted not to hoard that beauty which is “the world's due” (l.14). The friend himself is represented as a type of currency. The pun on legal tender in the poet's reference to the friend as “tender churl” (l.12) should not be overlooked.

The money imagery functions in similar fashion in sonnet 2, “When forty winters shall besiege thy brow.” “Thrift” and “thriftless” here undergo a reversal of their everyday meanings, and the friend is again exhorted to bear in mind that to hoard one's beauty is to waste it. To share beauty, that is, to propagate it in one's children, is to have that beauty make a profit for its holder. The “thrift” which Shakespeare here advises is akin to the Neoplatonic notion that it is natural for the beautiful to wish to propagate itself. All that seems to separate the sonnet from the Neoplatonic doctrine of Ficino on this point is the mercantile vocabulary Shakespeare employs. That the proper response to beauty is to spread it by means of generation and procreation does not seem to disturb us when Socrates relates the words of Diotima in the Symposium; yet the fact that Shakespeare, though he says essentially the same thing, forwards the notion in terms of profit and loss does seem somehow disturbing to the reader, but this is a point to be taken up later.

In the later sonnets the attitude toward wealth implied in the imagery is no longer so constant. In sonnet 63, “Against my love shall be, as I am now,” the “treasure of his spring,” the treasure of the beloved friend's youthful days, is just momentary, victim to the ravages of time. Only in the poem, in the labor of love which is the poetic process, shall the friend's beauty endure:

His beauty shall in these black lines be seen
And they shall live, and he in them still green.

(ll. 13-14)

Gold and wealth are here transcended by love, and yet—and I do not press the point—it is ironic that the colors black and green, for all they represent in the poem, connote financial solvency, at least to the modern reader.

In the well-known sonnet 116, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds,” love is of worth “unknown.” This can be viewed in at least two ways—that love stands in a realm entirely apart from considerations of material worth, or that love is of incalculable material worth. In this sense, the poem is central to any study of the ambiguity in the attitude toward money in the sonnets.

There are poems in this group, it should be noted, in which Shakespeare's attitude toward wealth is wholly derogatory. In sonnet 102, “My love is strength'ned, though more weak in seeming,” love is explicitly greater than gold, something, in fact, entirely apart from the realm of gold. To barter it, to use it, to treat it like gold, is to demean it:

That love is merchandiz'd whose rich esteeming
The owner's tongue doth publish everywhere.

(ll. 3-4)

In sonnet 125, “Were't aught to me I bore the canopy,” the poet sets up an opposition between his “oblation, poor but free” (l.10) and the overvalued praise of those who pay homage to mere externals. The implication, of course, is that true value, internal value, cannot be measured in terms of money. Taking just these last two sonnets one might well argue that money imagery in Shakespeare has a pejorative force, and extend Clemen's analysis of its use in King Lear to its general use throughout Shakespeare. I hope, however, that I have already shown that this cannot be done.

A pronounced shift in the view of wealth comes with sonnet 127 and those following, the so-called Dark Lady sonnets which take us almost to the very end of the sonnet sequence. Here money is no longer a synonym for love or beauty as it is in some of the earlier sonnets; rather, it is a means of entrapment, and thus the money imagery serves to reinforce the tone of unhappy captivity characteristic of the Dark Lady sequence.

With this sequence it at last becomes necessary to pose the first key to the money imagery in the sonnets—that riches are for Shakespeare very often a synonym for sexuality. This is an identification equally apparent in the procreation sequence. Beauty, says the poet to his dear friend in sonnet 2, is “the treasure of thy lusty days” (l.6). In the Dark Lady sequence, however, the sexual identification is more pronounced; that is, it is sexuality that is dominant here, whereas in the procreation sequence it is the generation of beauty through sexual love that is uppermost.

In sonnet 134, “So, now I have confess'd that he is thine,” the poet describes himself “mortgag'd to [her] will …” (l.2), prisoner to the Dark Lady's willfulness and sexual power.⁷ The “bond” in the poem is not one of obligation but of enthrallment. The “covetous” lady is presented to us as a “usurer, that put'st forth all to use” (l.10), sure, in other words, of her sensual power, and not at all averse to its use. Money here is wicked, yet, like the lady herself, darkly attractive and captivating. Sonnet 135 continues the play on “will”—as legal document, as willfulness, as sexual power, and, specifically, power over the poet himself:

So thou, being rich in Will, add to thy Will
One will of mine to make thy large Will more.

(ll.11-12)

The lady's greedy acquisitiveness, her drawing to herself of people and feelings, her increasing in power, is echoed in sonnet 136. Love in these poems is acquisitive and dominantly sexual, and hence the money imagery employed in them is of acquisitive force. Yet it would be an error to stress these poems at the expense of the earlier procreation sonnets in which sexuality is a mode of sharing beauty, and not of mere carnal captivity. That both sets of poems employ financial imagery in similar ways, yet to such divergent ends, is proof enough that no simple solution to the imagery is possible. Partridge goes too far in one direction, Schmidt, by leaving “treasure” at money and anything of great value, by ignoring the question of sexuality entirely, too far in another.⁸ An integration of sorts is in order—not necessarily the formulation of a fixed and static view of Shakespeare's treatment of sexuality in terms of money, just the opposite in fact. As the context changes, so too does the attitude implicit in the money imagery employed. Money is a hateful thing in those sonnets in the Dark Lady sequence in which money imagery plays a part. It is there a symbol of sensual bondage, of enthrallment to the sensual pleasure of this world. And yet, in the procreation sonnets, both it and sexuality are reverenced as things of great beauty.

The point is easily made by a comparison of sonnet 4, “Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend,” and sonnet 146, “Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth.” Beauty is a usurer in the first, which presents “what since medieval times was conceived to be the lesson of the Parable of the Talents—the wise use of the gifts of God or Nature.”⁹ To hoard what Nature loans is to deprive oneself of interest; the only way to attain an “acceptable audit” of one's days on earth is the generation of still more beauty through sexual love. The fool who hoards that beauty loaned to him can indeed be called “[profitless] usurer,” the insult residing not in the noun, but rather in the adjective.

Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,
Which, uséd, lives th'executor to be.

(ll.13-14)

From this overt statement of personal gain and freedom from loss and waste in the sharing of beauty through procreation, we move to the denunciation of riches in sonnet 146, and with that a rejection of earthly carnal passion. Sensuality, all the things of this earth, is but a “fading mansion” upon which it is wasteful to spend, for it has “so short a lease.” Things of this world are but the legacy of worms.

Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross:
Within be fed, without be rich no more.

(ll.11-12)

The rejection of earthly riches, of dark sexuality, is here explicit. The metaphor, however, is ambiguous. “Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross. …” Heaven is itself a kind of wealth, and repentance is seen in terms of bartering one kind of treasure for another.

I return here to the question of diction and vocabulary which I posed earlier in discussing the relationship between the procreation sonnets and the Symposium. The only difference between them, I submitted, other than Shakespeare's stressing just a small part of Diotima's lesson, is the mercantile imagery Shakespeare employs. Treasure is often in Shakespeare synonymous with Plato's ideal of the Good. To the reader who asks whether or not Shakespeare's treasure and wealth are then to be divorced from their worldly connotations I respond with two questions of my own, neither of which I pretend to be able to answer: Can they be so divorced from their worldly connotations? Ought they to be? Herford provides something in the way of an answer when he says of Shakespeare, “He is one of the greatest of poets, yet his poetry is woven of no tissue of myth and dream; its staple is the humanity we know, its basis the ground we tread; what we call the prose world, far from being excluded, is genially taken in, and more alive than ever.”¹⁰

Herford's stress on Shakespeare's normality and humanity is useful because it provides us with the root of an observation made many times before in many different contexts, but which, I feel, needs to be stated once again—namely, that a plethora of money images in a body of poetry does not necessarily indicate any kind of sickness or perversion or imbalance on the part of the poet. If a sense of imbalance is to be anywhere implied, most likely it resides in that society of readers which persists in viewing such imagery in terms of its own prejudices. Only by overcoming these prejudices, if he has them, will the reader be able to sense the nearly complete picture of money imagery in the sonnets presented in numbers 87, 91, and 29, and apprehend the shifts in the view of money implied in them.

In sonnet 87, “Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,” money is once more equated with beauty, but with beauty of a haughty kind. The money imagery is employed in an attack on the haughty friend, for it implicitly suggests that his pride has its basis in a mere material, hence transitory, thing:

Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing
And like enough thou know'st thy estimate.

(ll.1-2)

Wealth can be just an illusory reason for joy, as we see in sonnet 91, “Some glory in their birth, some in their skill.” Love, we see, transcends money and riches:

Thy love is [better] than high birth to me,
Richer than wealth, prouder than garments' cost,
Of more delight than hawks or horses be;
And having thee, of all men's pride I boast,
          Wretched in this alone, that thou mayst take
          All this away and me most wretched make.

(ll.9-14)

However, to take love away from the poet is to leave him wretched, little different from leaving him poor, which points again to an implicit identification of love and wealth.

In the famous sonnet 29, “When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,” there is a tension, or, better, a union, between the ideal and the material:

For thy sweet love rememb'red such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

(ll.13-14)

The identification of love and wealth is, of course, explicit, but the full meaning of this coupling lies suspended in the last line of the poem. Depending upon whether love is to the poet a treasure which makes him richer than kings, or else a treasure which sets him apart from kings, then is love either like in kind to gold and greater in degree or else different in kind. That the last line seems to allow both readings reinforces the notion of a union in the treasure-image between spirituality and materialism.

The fact that Shakespeare is able both to wound and to praise in terms of gold and riches goes right to the heart of a question much too large in scope for the present study, man's ambiguous attitude toward worldly riches. What I can touch upon in this essay are some observations and speculations about possible sources and parallels of the ambiguous monetary diction, and, more important since it embraces the first, possible starting points for an investigation of the ambiguous attitude evidenced in the sonnets toward money and what it represents.

The second of the keys to the money imagery in Shakespeare's sonnets which I propose, then, is to look to medieval poetry for possible sources of much of his financial diction. In sonnet 4, already discussed, the dear friend's beauty is a “great sum of sums” (l.8). In sonnet 37, “As a decrepit father takes delight,” the friend's “worth and truth” is an “abundance” which suffices the poet, who, in fact, sustains his very life on part of it. In sonnet 38, “How can my Muse want subject to invent,” the poet says to the beloved friend:

Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth
Than those old nine which rimers invocate.

(ll.9-10)

Each of these examples is a parallel to that aspect of medieval poetic theory which, according to Leo Spitzer, gives the superlative a quantitative presentation.¹¹ Spitzer analyzes the late thirteenth-century lyric “Blow, northerne wind”:

He is coral of godnesse,
He is rubye of rightfulnesse,
He is crystal of clannesse,
And baner of bealte,
He is lilye of largesse,
He is parvenke of prowesse,
He is solsecle of swetnesse,
And ledy of lealte.(12)

(ll.29-36)

“[The] additive use of superlatives,” Spitzer says, “implies a normative attitude toward the Beloved which is peculiarly medieval, and may create a chilling effect upon the modern reader. …”¹³ Such an enumerative technique may well be “peculiarly medieval.” Chaucer employs it on occasion, to be sure,¹⁴ but, then again, so does Sidney in the “First Song” of Astrophel and Stella, and so does Spenser in the Amoretti (sonnet 64) and the “Epithalamion” (stanza 10), though both do modify the technique. One may therefore reasonably speculate upon the influence of this technique on Shakespeare, and of the compression in his work of the enumerative list into a poetic statement of great quantity.

A second aspect of Shakespeare's mercantile diction which might be profitably traced to medieval roots is his use of money and gold to signify spirituality. I speak here not of an attitude which links the two, as it were, in the mind, but of the fact that very often in medieval verse we encounter the financial image as allegory for facets of the spiritual relationship between man and God. Even in so anti-materialistic a vision as William Langland's we find the Cross seen in terms of worldly treasure:

Arise and reverence God's resurrection,
And creep to the cross on knees and kiss it for a jewel!(15)

Medieval religious lyrics, moreover, often utilize mercantile imagery for Christ's redemption of man, as in the late thirteenth-century lyric “I sike when I singe.”

Alas! Men beth wode
That swereth by the Rode,
And selleth him for nought
That boghte us out of sinne.
He bring us to winne,
That hath us dere boght!(16)

(ll.55-60)

I do not maintain by any means that medieval poets equated earthly treasure with the glories of the spirit; certainly, the very idea would have been anathema to them. I speak here only about the diction of medieval poetry, and its possible influence upon that of Shakespeare. Perhaps the point is that the poet's resources are limited in the sense that the learned and abstract terminology which he might employ in dealing with love and the spirit is, as most theorists of poetic diction would maintain, basically unpoetic. If he attacks earthly treasure in favor of the glories of the spiritual life, in favor of some mode of transcendent love, he is, as Langland and the Pearl poet were, forced back to earthly treasure in order to describe the unearthly.

Returning to Shakespeare, one observes that the medieval notion of Christ as buyer of men's souls has strong echoes in the sonnets. The thought of the “dear friend” in sonnet 30, “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,” restores all “losses” for the poet and ends all his “sorrows.” Love is, metaphorically, a means of both material gain and spiritual renewal. In sonnet 120, “That you were once unkind befriends me now,” money is equated with injury, and one injury cancels out another, leaving the world fresh again and renewed:

But that your trespass now becomes a fee;
Mine ransoms yours, and yours must ransom me.

(ll.13-14)

Central to this notion of love in monetary terms as a renewing force able to wipe away all sorrow and rejuvenate the unhappy world is sonnet 34, “Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day.” The poet's sorrow at being slighted by the beloved friend is wiped away by the tears of pearl which the friend sheds in remorse:

Ah! but those tears are pearl which thy love sheds,
And they are rich, and ransom all ill deeds.

(ll.13-14)

The Christ-renewal pattern, evident in the entire poem and made explicit in its very last clause, though J. B. Leishman does not deal with this or any of the other poems which I have cited in this context, is what he is talking about when he considers the theme of “compensation” in the sonnets.¹⁷ “Where,” he asks, “in previous European poetry, from the Greeks until Shakespeare's own day, can we find any form whatever of this topic of ‘compensation,’ let alone anything approaching Shakespeare's treatment of it?”¹⁸

I trust that the mercantile convention of medieval poetry of the Passion to which I have called the reader's attention provides an answer to the first part of Leishman's question, despite the fact that he arbitrarily dismisses religious poetry from consideration.¹⁹ Moreover, if we accept the evidence offered by Peter Dronke to show the implicit identification in medieval love poetry between the love of God and the love of a lady, between divine love and secular love—an identification to be observed, though we must here replace lady with friend, in certain of Shakespeare's own sonnets—then further parallels to this theme of “compensation” in Shakespeare present themselves.²⁰ Contemporary with Shakespeare, for example, is Giles Fletcher's “I wish sometimes, although a worthless thing,” in which the poet presents his beloved as compensation for the lack of material wealth:

Kiss me, sweet Love! This favour do for me;
Then Crowns and Kingdoms shall I scorn for thee.(21)

(ll.13-14)

Closer to Shakespeare, perhaps, is “The richest relic Rome did ever view,” credited to Henry Constable.²² Here love and beauty are presented in material terms, the relationship between the lady and Caesar's tomb being metaphorically explicit. Here, too, the beloved is looked upon as a compensatory treasure, a treasure which ransoms away all the woes of life:

Thy naked beauty, bounteously displayed,
Enricheth monarchies of hearts with love!
Thine ears to hear complaints are open laid!
Thine eyes' kind looks requite all pains I prove!

(ll. 9-12)

That Shakespeare was not alone in the expression of this notion of “compensation” is evident from these examples. That he was not the first to imply it is evident from the medieval poems of the Passion, and from much of medieval secular love poetry if we take into account the spiritual element in that poetry observed by Dronke. I do, however, agree with Leishman that it is vain to look to other poets for “anything approaching Shakespeare's treatment of it.” Of course, the same holds true for most of Shakespeare's themes. Were we to judge literature by whether or not it reached Shakespearean heights, then surely we would be fools of the first order, constantly overlooking beauty and worth in search of something which these words do not quite describe. It is apparent, nevertheless, that Constable's sonnet presents us with a vision less spiritual than sensual, a vision far less marked by that integration of the ideal and the material so dominant in sonnet 34, and certain other of Shakespeare's poems.

The point is that it is almost impossible to pigeonhole the money imagery of Shakespeare's sonnets into ready-made categories like earthly and spiritual, demeaned and exalted, and so on, just as it is almost impossible for any intelligent man to create for himself a rigid scheme whereby things earthly are by dint of that fact demeaned and wicked and things spiritual exalted. And even if this could be done, it would be foolish to assign a poem or even a phrase to the one realm or the other merely on the basis of the vocabulary it employs. Just as one may whisper “an amorous Thou,” and really mean It, so it seems possible that one may say It and mean Thou.²³ It is not, then, the money terminology that must govern our apprehension of the sonnets in which it plays a part—that is, unless we can refrain from applying to it our preconceived biases, in which case the money imagery takes on in Shakespeare the guise of an almost fresh speech, a new language—but rather the attitude beneath the terminology.

To explore the attitude toward money in Shakespeare is the third and, at this time, final key to the money imagery of the sonnets which I wish here to propose. It is at one and the same time the point most central to a consideration of that imagery and the point about which the least can be definitely ascertained. To search for possible literary sources is here of little value. One would do better to search his own heart and mind for the answer to the central question: what does money mean?

I have tried to indicate already that Shakespeare is humanly inconsistent on this point—that for him money wavers between a representation of the transitory, and hence essentially valueless, things of this earth, and a representation of the transcending value of spiritual love. One fruitful line of investigation might be a study of the influence of Calvinism upon Shakespeare's imagery. While it did not take firm hold in England till the seventeenth century, Calvinism was certainly not unknown in the England of Shakespeare's day.²⁴ In one form or another the capitalist outlook, even without overt acknowledgment of the Calvinist notion that riches were a sign of God's favor, was introduced into England during the Elizabethan Age.²⁵ That Calvinism reached the Court itself and made itself felt there is a certainty. Spenser's magnum opus is at least in part a defense of its tenets. Fulke Greville, one of Elizabeth's court favorites and friend to the most popular poet of the era, is known to have been influenced by its doctrine.²⁶ It is true enough that when Shakespeare deals with Puritanism directly, as he does in the character of Malvolio in Twelfth Night, he usually holds it up to ridicule. Yet there is an element of pathos in Malvolio and of deliberate cruelty to him on the part of the other characters which qualifies this somewhat. Moreover, the sonnets, in which there are many overt linkings of treasure and spirit, seem to reveal many times a closer affinity to Calvinist doctrine than has yet been shown.

No one, I venture to say, would flatly deny a relationship between religious belief and the perception of material wealth. One cannot but agree with Werner Sombart that there are definite links between the Old Testament and the desire for material gain, that the biblical praise of riches “give the tone to the whole of Proverbs.”²⁷ One wonders, of course, how much of this biblical praise of wealth may be traced, once again, to the fact of a scanty and esoteric “spiritual” vocabulary, how much to a genuine acquisitive ethos. The question, however, pales alongside the larger issue of the practical influence of such phraseology. Man's vision of riches has been in large part shaped in the religious sphere, and here lies the root of the dual nature of that vision. Are the worlds of grace and of riches separate and apart, as they were to the medieval Church, or are they somehow complementary, as in the Calvinist doctrine?²⁸

Certainly both attitudes persisted into the Renaissance, and, one might add, since the capitalist outlook is no less a fact of life now than it was then, and since now as then we are at least partially what our collective past has made us, both have persisted even into the present day.

Cases of usury were being heard by ecclesiastical courts under Elizabeth, and even in a great commercial center like the City of London it was still possible in the reign of James I for the Bishop's Commissary to be trying tradesmen for “lending up pawnes for an excessive gain.”²⁹

The danger in applying socio-economic theory to the elucidation of literature is, as I have tried to point out, the tendency of one or another critic to allow a single view to get the upper hand. In Miss M. C. Bradbrook's words: “Professor Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism—a book so valuable and persuasive that its use should be very strictly controlled—has been invoked to defend Antonio and to blacken Shylock.”³⁰ It seems to me, and I take it that Miss Bradbrook would agree with me, that such a view, based on a selective reading of Tawney's book, constitutes a warping of the play and a misrepresentation of the ambiguity it presents. A discussion of The Merchant of Venice, however, is not germane to the present study.³¹

Admittedly I have put special emphasis on what might be called the sacred use of money imagery in the sonnets, though I have tried to present a fair picture of the use of money imagery generally in the sonnets. If I have stressed the sacred money imagery disproportionately, which I think I have not, it is because of a desire on my part to restore a kind of balance to the reading of the imagery of riches and wealth. The whole question of the sacred, spiritual, use of money and riches in the sonnets has been largely ignored. Uppermost in the minds of the critics has been the vision of money as wicked, as something somehow inconsistent in a body of poetry which often aims at the expression of a love of the highest kind. Such a phobia against idealizing the material and giving material weight to the ideal can only blind us to the pristine innocence of a Jay Gatsby and the innocent beauty of a “dear friend” whose love restores all “losses” and ends all “sorrows.”

Notes

1. I refer the reader to sonnets 1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 29, 30, 34, 37, 38, 46, 49, 52, 64, 67, 75, 77, 79, 84, 87, 91, 102, 115, 117, 120, 125, 134, 135, 136, and 146 in The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, ed. William Allen Neilson and Charles Jarvis Hill (Cambridge, Mass., 1942). All subsequent citations of the sonnets refer to this edition and appear in the text.

2. Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago, 1947), pp. 422-423.

3. Wolfgang H. Clemen, The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), p. 135.

4. John Erskine Hankins, Shakespeare's Derived Imagery (Lawrence, Kan., 1953), pp. 197-207.

5. Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge, 1935), Table IV.

6. Hankins, pp. 247-248.

7. Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy (New York, 1960). See entries for “will,” “coin,” “commodity,” “jewel,” “treasure,” “treasury,” “usury,” etc.

8. Alexander Schmidt, Shakespeare Lexicon, 2 vols. (New York, 1968), II, 1254.

9. Hilton Landry, Interpretations in Shakespeare's Sonnets (Berkeley, Calif., 1963), p. 8.

10. C. H. Herford, “The Normality of Shakespeare Illustrated in His Treatment of Love and Marriage,” The English Association, No. 47 (September 1920), p. 15.

11. Leo Spitzer, “Explication du Texte Applied to Three Great Middle English Poems,” Archivum Linguisticum, 3 (1951), 6.

12. Medieval English Lyrics, ed. R. T. Davies (Evanston, Ill., 1964), pp. 88-91.

13. Spitzer, p. 7.

14. “Madame, ye ben of all beaute shrine,” in Davies, pp. 133-134.

15. Piers the Plowman, ed. Rachel Attwater (London, 1957), p. 178.

16. Davies, pp. 82-84.

17. J. B. Leishman, Themes and Variations in Shakespeare's Sonnets (London, 1961), pp. 202-205.

18. Ibid., p. 206.

19. Ibid., p. 207.

20. Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1965), I, 5, 95, 99, 106.

21. Sidney Lee, ed., Elizabethan Sonnets, 2 vols. (Westminster, 1904), II, 40.

22. Lee, II, 94.

23. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith, 2nd ed. (New York, 1958), p. 34.

24. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York, 1958), pp. 95-98.

25. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York, 1958), pp. 150-164.

26. John Buxton, Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance, 2nd ed. (New York, 1964), p. 100.

27. Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, trans. M. Epstein (Glencoe, Ill., 1951), p. 219.

28. Tawney, pp. 39-54.

29. Tawney, p. 53.

30. M. C. Bradbrook, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1964), p. 72.

31. For an illuminating reevaluation of the play, I refer the reader to Harold C. Goddard's “The Merchant of Venice,” in The Meaning of Shakespeare, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1951), I, 81-116.