SOURCE: Dubrow, Heather. “‘In Thievish Ways’: Tropes and Robbers in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Early Modern England.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 96, no. 4 (October 1997): 514-44.

[In the following excerpt, Dubrow contends that thievery, as it existed in Elizabethan England, is used metaphorically in Shakespeare's sonnets to suggest various types of loss and destabilization.]

I

Proclaiming her resolve to remain faithful to Romeo, Juliet catalogues the dreadful fates she would accept in lieu of wedding his rival:

O, bid me leap, rather than marry Paris,
From off the battlements of any tower,
Or walk in thievish ways, or bid me lurk
Where serpents are; chain me with roaring bears,
Or hide me nightly in a charnel-house.

(IV.i.77-81)¹

Few members of Shakespeare's original or twentieth-century audience would be likely to list a promenade “in thievish ways” (79) as their favorite leisure activity, but Juliet's reaction to that prospect is surprisingly vehement: she implicitly likens such a walk to a particularly horrendous form of suicide, to close encounters with serpents and bears, and to the terrors of the grave, proleptically and vividly detailed later in the speech.²

Shakespeare's poems and plays frequently mention thievery, troping loss as a consequence of it and often though not invariably evoking it with a dread reminiscent of Juliet's. Some of these passages allude to literal instances of the crime; others brandish accusations of it as insults, demonstrating how blame may reveal anxieties unrelated to its ostensible subject, as does its step-sibling praise. Thus Egeus accuses the importunate and unfortunate Lysander of stealing his daughter, a trope echoed by Brabantio and Iago. Attempting to justify his mistreatment of Rosalind, Duke Ferdinand declares to Celia, “she robs thee of thy name” (I.iii.80). Richard II repeatedly labels Bolingbroke a thief, and Hamlet describes his stepfather as “a cutpurse of the empire” (III.iv.99). Timon asserts that sun, sea, and earth are all thieves, ending his embittered diatribe on the accusation, “All that you meet are thieves” (WV.iii.446). Despite the current critical interest in materiality and in many forms of transgression, however, by and large Shakespeare's extensive commentaries on thievery are either overlooked or mentioned in passing; thus essays on The Rape of Lucrece generally discuss this metaphor for Tarquin's behavior only briefly, and analyses of the Henriad typically rehearse the important but familiar point that the court no less than the tavern is a den of robbers.³

References to thievery recur with particular frequency in Shakespeare's sonnets, and these allusions gloss and are glossed by the preoccupation with that crime in Tudor and Stuart England. Hence exploring how and why the sequence engages with thievery can provide new perspectives on these texts, on other Shakespearean poems and plays, and on their culture. Studying this felony also raises broader issues that currently concern many critics, notably ambivalences about agency, the workings of place and displacement, and the breakdown of systems of classification that has recently been termed a “category crisis.”⁴ Moreover, a journey down the “thievish ways” of the sonnets can shed light on the current state of the academic field variously and contentiously known as “early modern studies” and “the Renaissance.”

II

The significance of thievery in Tudor and Stuart England is manifest in the wide range of documents—notably records of indictments, royal proclamations, manuals for magistrates, and the literature of roguery that allude to it. Among the most revealing are the records of the assize courts, which detail the names and occupations of indicted defendants and the disposition of the cases. I am not of course claiming these records lend themselves to a positivistic reading; indeed, they offer an intriguing test case for the evidentiary problems of literary and cultural history. Their principal editor, James Cockburn, admits their lacunae, notably the fact that most records for Tudor and Stuart England refer only to the home counties; other historians have uncovered such errors as a telling tendency to ascribe the occupation “laborer” to defendants who apparently were in other lines of work.⁵ Moreover, students of crime, who disagree on almost everything else, are united in lamenting the epistemological dangers caused by the so-called “dark figure” of unreported crimes that inevitably affects these and many other records. Poststructuralism in general and pragmatics in particular enjoin us to interpret such records not as factual indications of what crimes occurred but rather as indications of what members of a certain community agreed to call and prosecute as a crime.

Yet such caveats impel students of Tudor and Stuart culture to read the assize records with caution, not to avoid reading them at all. For example, the lack of such documents for northern counties delimits but does not destroy their value in studying other areas of England. And in this instance as in so many others, the position that a particular observer or community constructs a so-called fact needs to be distinguished from the less persuasive claim that no material reality exists separate from those constructions, a distinction that even, or especially, Richard Rorty acknowledges;⁶ hence admitting that crime is a constructed category does not preclude adducing the assize records for useful data about its material manifestations.

Some evidence suggests that market towns, a category that includes Stratford-upon-Avon, suffered an unusually high incidence of theft; Shakespeare's familiarity with thievery in its most literal sense may well have gone back to his childhood in Stratford, warning us against the tendency, common in some though not all new historicist writing, to focus on London to the exclusion of other areas.⁷ But in any event the assize records testify that thievery in its various forms—burglary, robbery, purse-snatching, horse stealing, and so on—was the principal felony throughout the Tudor and Stuart periods in the counties for which such texts survive. The older view that crimes of violence dominated the sixteenth and seventeenth century, to be succeeded by crimes against property in the succeeding century, is still upheld by certain criminologists, particularly French scholars; students of crime in England, however, typically cite the assize documents to indicate that most crimes during those centuries were in fact against property. In Essex, Joel Samaha reports, ninety percent of all reported felonies fell into that category.⁸

Assize transcripts also repeatedly demonstrate that a high proportion of crimes was committed by members of the same or adjoining communities—a pattern that, as I will suggest, renders cultural myths about rogues and vagabonds, outsiders who intrude on the pastoral serenity of a community, especially revealing. Many of these crimes were petty robberies of goods such as food, making it harder to catch the perpetrator or even be sure the crime had occurred; in the case of food, the miscreant might well consume the incriminating evidence long before being apprehended. Hence a number of instances of thievery in small towns were attended with uncertainty—did someone in the family, not a marauder, eat the pie? Poststructuralist doubt, like charity, begins at home.

There is considerable evidence of an increase in crime during the Elizabethan period, though this may be more true of some counties than others. In particular, J. A. Sharpe asserts that crimes against property rose to a peak in the 1590s and possibly were also high in some years of James's reign.⁹ This increase may well have been especially marked in London.¹⁰ Contemporary documents suggest that such a change was certainly perceived in some quarters—or that the perception was encouraged as a rationale for stringent legislation. Thus a royal proclamation against handguns dated 1600 declares that “great and manifold disorders, insolencies, robberies, and murders have grown and been committed within this realm and other [sic] her majesty's dominions by the common carrying and use of guns.”¹¹ It is suggestive that many authorities document a rise in crime in the late 1590s, the very years the Henriad was being performed; Shakespeare's original audience may well have feared that many avenues of their city were turning into Juliet's “thievish ways.”

Burglary, which typically involved entry into a dwelling at night, was punished more severely than many other types of robbery;¹² twentieth century sociologists report that victims often react with special anxiety to that crime.¹³ The intense responses in both cultures probably stem, at least in part, from the burglar's violation of a home, a private space. Thus that felon challenges yet another distinction, the divide between inside and outside; all crime is transgression, and the burglar literally trangresses in the sense of stepping over a boundary. Moreover, the perpetrator intrudes into a “forfended place” (King Lear, V.i.11), a phrase Regan deploys in the different but not unrelated context of Edmund's adulteries; the connections between violating a house and a woman's body become explicit in The Rape of Lucrece, as well as in several documents I will examine shortly.

Not only the nature of the crime but also the status of the accused offender affected how rigorously his or her offense was prosecuted and punished. Throughout much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, loopholes in the law and inefficiencies allowed defendants variously to escape any punishment and to avoid the most severe penalties; for example, many convicted criminals escaped hanging by relying on benefit of clergy, the procedure by which a defendant could evade execution by proving that he or she could read and hence was ostensibly a clergyman. A number of theories have been adduced to explain why a culture that clearly feared crime so deeply was lenient in such instances; among the most persuasive are the arguments that many offenders were indigent neighbors and hence evoked sympathy.¹⁴ As we will see, the tension between vigorous condemnation and exculpation is staged as well in Shakespeare's sonnets. Conversely, the assize records repeatedly demonstrate that offenders who were outsiders to the community were more likely to be prosecuted sedulously and sentenced harshly than its members.¹⁵

The attitudes behind such statistics are manifest in the fascinating manual on law enforcement that William Lambard published in 1581, Eirenarcha. He assures justices that they may seize the goods of “anye outlandishe persons (calling themselves Egiptians).”¹⁶ Notice that the covert pun “outlandishe” links social transgression and the Other who is literally from an outlying land. Notice too that the phrase “calling themselves” implies that their title may itself involve deceit. This connection between crime and a deceptive self-fashioning appears in many other cultural texts; royal proclamations, for example, repeatedly suggest that vagrants, never having seen military service, pretend to be demobilized soldiers. And it is no accident that near the beginning of I Henry IV Falstaff at once reveals and conceals his role as thief by assigning a series of names to it. Such misrepresentations were particularly threatening, I suggest, because they undermine the hope that crime, that arena of epistemological uncertainty, can be controlled by recognizing, classifying, and labelling its perpetrators (some early modern treatises even list the names of putative villains)—a hope that also impels the emphasis on line-ups in popular twentieth-century treatments of crime, notably televised police dramas.

Lambard's concern about outsiders recurs in a book that he published three years later, The Duties of Constables. Here Lambard asserts that officers “may also arrest such strange persons as do walke abroade in the night season.”¹⁷ In the late sixteenth century, “strange” could mean “belonging to another country,” “belonging to some other place or neighbor hood,” “unknown, unfamiliar,” and “abnormal.”¹⁸ Thus the word both records and enacts the process of Othering by linking the foreigner to the deviant and associating the unknown with the abnormal. To the extent that these outsiders are from a different neighborhood or country, they are menacingly displaced both geographically and temporally: they have entered a community where they do not belong, and arguably Lambard is also implying that by walking at night they are temporally as well as spatially out of place. Might not Lambard's vehemency in denouncing outsiders attempt to deflect onto them the transgressions that he is loathe to associate with intimates and neighbors?

As the flood of legislation on the subject testifies, during the English Renaissance considerable anxiety also swirled around one particular genre of outsider, those people described in contemporary texts as rogues and vagabonds.¹⁹ These groups, repeatedly mentioned both in laws and in the pamphlets to which I will turn shortly, were represented as shiftless criminals and often as thieves; vagabonds or vagrants in particular were portrayed as roving far from their original homes to prey on honest citizens by begging and committing crimes. Yet thieves were not necessarily perceived as vagrants or rogues in the eyes of Tudor and Stuart England; indeed, as I have suggested, indictment records demonstrate that offenders typically were not vagrants but rather insiders in the sense of members of the community and were clearly recognized as such. That fact, however, makes rogues and vagabonds more, not less, important to an analysis of the texts of thievery. For these two groups, I will argue, were represented in the ways they were in part because their culture was attempting to suppress the fear that crime was often, so to speak, an inside job.

A range of documents has been adduced in studying rogues and vagrants. The widely respected work by the social historian A. L. Beier relies heavily on arrest records and legislation attempting to control the imputed threats in question.²⁰ Among the most tempting sources of information, however, are lively accounts of the habits of these groups written by contemporary observers. An early contribution to this subgenre of the picaresque is Thomas Harman's Caveat for Commen Cursetors (1566-1567).²¹ Robert Greene recounts the tricks and habits he ascribes to rogues in his three cony-catching pamphlets, A Notable Discovery of Cosenage (1591), The Second Part of Conny-Catching (1591; rev. ed. 1592), and The Thirde and Last Part of Conny-Catching (1592).²² The appearance of these three texts within two years suggests the popularity of their subject matter. Among the many other pamphlets responding to and intensifying that popularity are Thomas Dekker's Belman of London (1608) and its sequel, Lanthorne and Candle-light (1608).

Until the final decades of the twentieth century, historians and literary critics regularly cited such texts as a largely accurate portrait of an underclass.²³ More recently, many social historians have persuasively insisted that the type of organized crime that Dekker, Greene, and others detail was far less prevalent than those writers suggest, if indeed it existed at all.²⁴ Crime, they remind us, was typically the work of local individuals or unorganized small groups, not the large gangs evoked in contemporary literature on the subject.

But to fault the literature of roguery as inaccurate is not to dismiss it as useless. As I noted, the miscreants in question are often presented as thieves, and it is precisely the constructedness of the treatises that makes them valuable for studying thievery in Shakespeare's sonnets and his culture. For that literature shows us how some influential writers wanted to perceive crime in general and the felony on which this essay concentrates in particular—or how they wanted to persuade their readers to perceive those subjects. In perusing these texts, we can watch stereotypes being created, ideology being shaped.²⁵ Kai T. Erickson has argued, provocatively if not wholly persuasively, that transgression was not successfully controlled in Puritan culture because the work it performed in allowing the culture to define its own social boundaries was more valuable than the damage it wrecked.²⁶ Similarly, one might speculate that the cultural work performed by the myths surrounding roguery and vagrancy outweighed the fear they excited. Hence the popularity of the literature on the subjects—and hence the imperative to explore it despite all the caveats offered by social historians.

The literature of roguery addresses the fear that the thief is really the boy next door by suggesting that he—and, significantly, often she as well—is in many senses an outsider. Displaced in more ways than one, rogues and vagabonds are seen as coming from a distant area: sometimes what is described simply as the north and sometimes Ireland. (Despite—or more likely because of—recent interest in Ireland among students of early modern literature and culture, the construction of a broader and no less significant category, the north, has not received the attention it deserves.) On the issue of geographical origins if not on many other questions, contemporary accounts of roguery accord with other sources of information, such as the parish records that indicate that migrants were from areas other than the home counties; the extensive legislation generated by Elizabethan fears of migrants and the unemployed insists on returning miscreants to the place of their birth or last employment.²⁷ This geographical Othering is mirrored by more implicit connections between the rogues and vagabonds on the one hand and Catholics on the other: Dekker and Greene both repeatedly refer to lock-picking, one of several types of thievery described in their treatises, as the “black art,” and a number of pamphlets stress the secrecy and cunning of rogues and vagabonds, thus echoing commonplace condemnations of Catholics as sorcerers and secretive villains.²⁸ Though such parallels between Catholics and rogues remain at best subterranean in the treatises in question, the association of Spenser's Abessa with robbery buttresses the suggestion that anti-Catholicism is in play, and, more to the point, at work, in these and similar descriptions of miscreants.

An intriguing passage in Harman's Caveat for Commen Cursetors recasts the geographical dichotomy of self and stranger in different spatial terms: “When Night approched y poore housholders repaired home to their houses, the other wayfaring bolde beggers remayned all night in the barne”;²⁹ shortly afterwards Harman adds the observation, “every of them havinge his woman” (sig. Aii). These references to barns associate the animal-like sexuality of the rogues and vagabonds with the abodes of animals. Displaced from their customary homes, these groups are associated with a site that is symbolically fitting. Their bedchamber appropriately signals and reinforces their status as outsiders: they not only come from outlying areas in England but also sleep in outbuildings. One of the basic premises of Aristotelian philosophy can explicate the description of those bedchambers: Aristotle repeatedly associates kind and place, maintaining that one characteristic of a given kind is to belong in a particular place, so that, for example, rocks will fall to the ground because that is their proper position. The outsiders in question deviate from their kind by animal-like behavior, and this deviation is signalled by their sleeping in the wrong place, the outbuildings usually reserved for animals. Hence here, as in many other instances, the twin issues traced in this essay, displacement and category crises, are closely related.

Immediately after this passage, a suggestively ambiguous phrase connects rogues and vagabonds with sexual transgression, though the exact form of behavior being described is unclear. “Every of them havinge his woman,” Harman writes, “except it were two wemen that lay alone to gether for some especyall cause” (sig. Aii). If this phrase does in fact represent one of the very few allusions to lesbianism in Tudor culture, it suggests that the women are outsiders in two senses: they are estranged both from conventional morality and from the heterosexual amorality of their own social group. This marginality is again figured by spatial estrangement in the tantalizing oxymoron “alone to gether.” The lines are themselves linguistically transgressive in the way they both tempt and resist interpretation: do they suggest that, motivated by morality these women are avoiding the customary sexual libidinousness of their cohorts—or that they are indulging in their own lesbian version of it? Or is there perhaps a hint that they are menstruating and hence following one social norm, at least, in avoiding men? Notice how the words “for some especyall cause” tease us, hinting at an explanation they do not offer.

Thieves' cant, a subject on which the tracts in question typically dwell at length, also involves the contrast between insiders and outsiders that is so central to crime in general and thievery in particular. Rogues talk what Harman's Caveat for Commen Cursetors labels “pedlers Frenche” (sig. Aiiii); this term, echoed in other contemporary accounts, establishes its speakers as outsiders both socially and nationally. The assumption that they are foreigners in more ways than one is reinforced by the references to Egyptians.

Yet rogues and vagabonds, like other criminals in Tudor and Stuart England, represent and provoke category crises, and the reassuring classification of them as outsiders is a case in point. Indeed, the very characteristics that render rogues and vagabonds outsiders could be reinterpreted to classify them as both inside and outside at once, thus replicating the anxiety that a criminal is really a neighbor or, to put it another way, that a stranger is a native. If the language attributed to these groups is in one sense determinedly foreign, nonetheless English words are used: linguistically as well as in so many other ways, the rogues and vagabonds are inside and outside at once. Similarly, throughout the cony-catching pamphlets Greene refers to the practices associated with particular crimes as “laws,” a usage that other writers on the subject adopt as well.³⁰ Embodying yet another category crisis, this term unresolvably confounds the illegal and the legal—thus again confounding outside and inside as well. Nor are rogues firmly categorized as unrelievedly evil. The cony-catching pamphlets, for all their surface morality, take pleasure in the cleverness and humor of the tricks they recount; the title page of Dekker's Belman of London promises that what follows is “delightfull for all men to Reade.”³¹ The blurring of the categories in which rogues and villains are cast—outsiders segue into insiders, perfidious knaves into lovable tricksters—involves a kind of epistemological displacement, yet another sense in which place is relevant. Although issues about displaced persons and blurred categories are germane to many types of criminal transgression besides thievery, those questions are particularly relevant to that felony. For arguably not the least reason for the cultural preoccupation with thievery is that it renders such issues literal and material in that the thief actually effects the displacement of property.

III

Thievery is as central to Shakespeare's sonnets as it is to the literature of roguery and other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century commentaries on crime, and questions of place and displacement and insiders and outsiders recur in these lyrics as well. For Shakespeare's sequence evokes a veritable crime wave, with thievery the primary offense. Love and beauty are cast as robbers—“A man in hue all hues in his controlling, / Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth” (20.7-8). The process of taking away is troped as robbery: “Yet doth it steal sweet hours from love's delight” (36.8). The best approach to thievery in these poems, however, is close reading, for some of the most significant allusions to that crime, like its most successful perpetrators, work subtly and even stealthily.

Sonnet 35 is a dense lyric that encapsulates the negotiations, lamentations, and rationalizations that thievery typically evokes both in Shakespeare's other poems and in his plays:

No more be griev'd at that which thou hast done:
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud,
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
All men make faults, and even I in this,
Authorizing thy trespass with compare,
Myself corrupting, salving thy amiss,
Excusing [thy] sins more than [thy] sins are;
For to thy sensual fault I bring in sense—
Thy adverse party is thy advocate—
And 'gainst myself a lawful plea commence.
Such civil war is in my love and hate,
That I an accessary needs must be
To that sweet thief which sourly robs from me.

This sonnet, like so many of Shakespeare's other texts, presents thievery not as an isolated incident but as an unending chain of events of which the actual alienation of property is but the beginning; it involves a long process that includes, even pivots on, the reactions and judgments of the victims. For they become implicated by excusing or even repeating the crimes; one robbery leads to another as inexorably as in the Henriad. Or, to put it another way, the sonnet sequence that is repeatedly drawn towards lyric repetition rather than the linearity and the closural propensities often (though not always) associated with narrative, the sonnet sequence whose couplets so often twist back to an earlier unresolved concern, evokes a crime that is similarly circular rather than linear. Indeed, as I will suggest, thievery is not only an incident within several sonnets but also a metaphor for the workings of the genre itself. In Sonnet 35, as in many plays by Shakespeare and many texts from his culture, the repetitions of thievery involve epistemological and other types of instability. Categories and the ethical judgments grounded in them are established only to be undermined, and contrasts are announced, then erased. Agency, always unstable in this sequence, is particularly so in poems involving thievery, appearing and disappearing repeatedly within a single poem.

The verbs in the first line of Sonnet 35 insist on linearity: the addressee has been grieved in the past but need not be in the future, and the act occasioning that sorrow can be firmly located in the past through the tense of “hast done” (1. 1). The rest of the quatrain performs a cognate act of stabilizing by assigning qualities to classes of objects in the natural world. Thus in lieu of the nominalism implied elsewhere in the sequence, this quatrain and the line that immediately succeeds it, “All men make faults” (1. 5), presume a realist position and the ensuing possibility of predication. Or, to put it another way, these lines gesture towards a world of fixed attributes and hence the possibility of stable valuation, an assumption attacked later in this sonnet and throughout the sequence.³² Thus in a sense the sonnet enacts in miniature the movement from a stable world of idealized vision to one of duplicity that Joel Fineman traces in the sequences as a whole.³³

But the first quatrain also hints at the forces that will challenge the order it ostensibly establishes. “Roses have thorns” (l. 2), for example, at once firmly establishes the attributes of the flower in question and associates attribution with paradox. When roses have thorns, presumably thieves may be sweet. Similarly, whereas “hast done” (1. 1) positions the addressee's guilt in the past, the thorns, mud, stains, and canker coexist with their hosts in the present. Notice too that the reference to the canker suggests yet another entry into a place where the intruder does not belong; more specifically, Jean de Meun and Blake would both remind us that roses often trope the female body, though these resonances remain subterranean at best here.

The second quatrain expands the conception of guilt in the poem and in so doing initiates the more overt challenge to categories that structures this lyric. The word “trespass” (1. 6) not only introduces religious connotations, thus linking sin and crime as Shakespeare does in Henry V when Bardolph steals the pax from the church, but also reinforces the connection between those two misdeeds and going where one does not belong, into a forfended place. More to our purposes now, the second quatrain challenges the distinction between judge and wrongdoer that was so firmly established in the opening line. The act of contrasting, clearly, is as perilous as “compare” (1. 6). Or, to put it another way, the elision between insider and outsider that is so central to the ideology of thievery here metamorphosizes into an elision of the self and other who were firmly contrasted in the opening. The temporality of the opening comes under attack as well: a clear division of past, present, and future, with the fault firmly located in the past, is replaced by a world of continuing error. No fewer than four present participles occur within the four lines of the quatrain.

The breakdown of categories and blurring of apparent contrasts that I traced in lines four through eight accelerates in the third quatrain. “Sense” (1.9) is the opposite of “sensual fault” (1.9) if one glosses it as “good judgment,” but it could of course refer to sensuality itself. An adverse party becomes an advocate. “Myself” in line eleven could either refer to the addressee, who is a kind of second self, or more literally to the speaker, so the distinction between the two of the them is yet another victim of the pervasive erosion. Not only categories but also agency blur in “'gainst myself a lawful plea commence” (1. 11): the speaker becomes at once subject and object.

Unsettling the customary sonnet structure by establishing a major syntactical break after line eleven rather than line twelve, the conclusion of the poem also further unsettles systems of classification and judgment. The thief and his advocate/accessory are united through the connotations of “civil war” (1. 12) even as the deictic in “that sweet thief” (1. 14) attempts to reestablish the distance between speaker and addressee that seemed so clear in line one. That final line replicates the failed attempt to create neat contrasts in another way as well: “sweet thief” and “sourly robs” may sound at first like a textbook example of that process, but while the adjective and adverb in the two phrases in question are clear opposites to each other, the nouns are not. The reader is primed by the syntax to expect something like “sweet thief who sourly gives.” Similarly, the Petrarchan oxymoron “sweet thief” both creates and challenges the opposites it links (if the thief is sweet, is he really a thief? if he is a thief, is he really sweet?)

The destabilization of categories again accompanies the destabilization of agency in this lyric. The very role of accessory both acknowledges and delimits agency. From another perspective, the speaker who assumed the role of judge in the first quatrain, who traced his responsibility through the chain of present participles in the second one, here writes, “needs must be” (1. 13). It is the thief who is the clear-cut agent in the concluding line—but also the thief who once again is blamed, for the speaker now excuses himself.³⁴ Responsibility is shifted from the felon to his victim, as it so often is in the cultural texts I examined. And that final line effects yet another reversal: the poem opened on “that which thou hast done,” thus assigning the fault to the past, but “thief” opens the possibility of repeated depredations—an apt ending to a poem that stages the contagion of a continuing process of excusing and erring.

Sonnet 35 suggests, then, that thievery generates not only an immediate deprivation but also long-term and continuing losses. Not the least of them is the demolition of the stable judgments that rest on a secure separation of good and evil and of victim and criminal. In lieu of such adjudications, the poem skids among condemnation, forgiveness, and confused combinations of those responses. This pattern is in some ways similar to the swerves between disapproval and sympathy that appear in the literature of roguery and in the legal system; the latter was characterized both by severe penalties and by many routes for escaping them. And this movement between accusation and forgiveness recurs repeatedly in Shakespeare's other sonnets and his plays.

Sonnet 40 replicates both the emphasis on judging a criminal and the problems that ensue in Sonnet 35. Its opening line, “Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all,” ostensibly accepts what will later be described as thievery, reconfiguring it as accepting a gift. The unresolved tensions in that redefinition emerge most clearly in the third quatrain:

I do forgive thy robb'ry, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty;
And yet love knows it is a greater grief
To bear love's wrong than hate's known injury.

This poem, like Sonnet 35, demonstrates that not the least danger attendant on walking in Juliet's “thievish ways” (IV.i.79) is the peril of excusing the very crimes from which one suffers. That danger is enacted in the apparent oxymoron “gentle thief” (1. 9). To the extent that the adjective and noun do contradict each other, they demonstrate the ways the process of excusing has distorted the speaker's judgments. If they are not contradictory, however, they signal other types of distortion. Perhaps this thievery is dangerous because the apparent gentleness of the perpetrator conceals the crime at the same time that the apparent gentleness of the speaker permits it. This possibility remains speculative, but the odd introduction of the adjective “known” in line twelve implies that its secrecy is one reason love's wrong is so painful. Or “gentle” (l. 9) may retain its social connotations, introducing the problem of whether in this instance thievery is the province of the privileged rather than the underclass that the literature of roguery is so concerned to define and that Shakespeare himself invokes in the phrase “vulgar thief” (1. 8) in Sonnet 48. This particular category crisis recurs in the Henriad.

The sonnets I have examined so far concentrate mainly on the guilt of the party who excuses the thief and the resulting fractures in subjectivity. In Sonnet 48 the guilt of the addressee is complicated in comparable ways and with comparable results:

How careful was I, when I took my way,
Each trifle under truest bars to thrust,
That to my use it might unused stay
From hands of falsehood, in sure wards of trust!
But thou, to whom my jewels trifles are,
Most worthy comfort, now my greatest grief,
Thou best of dearest, and mine only care,
Art left the prey of every vulgar thief.
Thee have I not lock'd up in any chest,
Save where thou art not, though I feel thou art,
Within the gentle closure of my breast,
From whence at pleasure thou mayst come and part,
And even thence thou wilt be stol'n, I fear,
For truth proves thievish for a prize so dear.

Like Sonnet 35, this poem is structured around a series of unstable contrasts. The security of “truest” (1. 2), “sure wards of trust” (1. 4), and “truth” (1. 14) is played against the threats of “hands of falsehood” (1. 4) and the connotations of “prey” (1. 8). But these contrasts break down when “truth proves thievish” (1. 14). Similarly, the addressee is contrasted with the thieves who threaten that most precious jewel of all. Yet the poem hints that this jewel may be responsible, at least in part, for its own hoist. As Stephen Booth has pointed out, “to whom my jewels trifles are” (1. 5) carries a secondary, subterranean meaning of “in whose estimation,” and the statement in line 12 that the addressee may depart “at pleasure” (1. 12) raises the possibility that her or his sensuality is the source of the theft.³⁵ In a poem that is about trust and its discontents (“sure wards of trust” [4] suggests both secure locks and reliability in a more literal sense), readers discover that they cannot trust apparent oppositions.

As in Sonnet 35, the category crises of thievery breed a world of uncertainty. “Save where thou art not, though I feel thou art” (1. 10) enacts the same paradox of knowing and unknowing that Shakespeare effects in the second line of Sonnet 138, “I do believe her, though I know she lies.”³⁶ It is fitting that the couplet incorporates the phrase “I fear” (1. 13), intensifying that verb through its status as a rhyme word. As I have indicated before, in Shakespeare's texts as in his culture, thievery often involves suspicion and fear rather than certainty. This poem—like so many of Shakespeare's sonnets—is about not a realized loss but the suspicion that it has occurred or may shortly occur. That suspicion feeds on the paradoxical workings of locks and chests: do they protect persons within from an outside marauder or imprison them lest they wreck harm themselves?

The references to locking in this poem position it within a complex pattern of tropes concerning husbandry, protection, using, spending, locking, and releasing.³⁷The Parable of the Talents is invoked explicitly in Sonnet 94 but implicitly at many other junctures. On the one hand, the sequence advocates a kind of sharing, a husbandry that involves not storing but sharing: “Thy unus'd beauty must be tomb'd with thee” (4.13). That which is locked away is presented as selfish, wasted. Edward Hubler has termed this dynamic, “the economy of the closed heart.”³⁸ But his study neglects the other side of this pattern, the celebration of the “sweet up-locked treasure” (52.2). Those who walk in thievish ways should provide themselves with the best possible security systems, and so these poems dwell on the need to lock one's valuables in literal strongboxes and within that other chest, the heart. Indeed, they are filled with images of chests, vials, and other enclosures for precious objects.³⁹ Within two lines, Sonnet 92 encapsulates several of the tensions I have been tracing: “But do thy worst to steal thyself away, / For term of life thou art assured mine.” On one level the verb “steal” is reassuring: it implies that the beloved is indeed the possession of the speaker, an implication buttressed in the subsequent line, and possession is nine-tenths of this sonnet. But in another sense that verb renders possession—and so much else—dubious. This is one of the many occasions when Shakespeare's poems and dramas play on “steal” in the double senses of “to rob” and “to depart secretly.” Thus he recalls the linkage between burglary and the concealment permitted by night that contributes to the fear and loathing excited with that crime. Thus too he yet again associates thievery less with the clear-cut grief of an indisputable loss than with the uncertainty and confusion created by secrecy and manifest in responses to an event that may or may not have happened. The victim's reactions to thievery, I have stressed, are as important a consequence of the crime as the depredations of the thief.

Equally significant is the treatment of agency in the first line of Sonnet 92: “But do thy worst to steal thyself away.” Subjectivity, so often compromised in texts about thievery, shatters into brittle fragments here. The addressee is both subject and object, both thief and prey. As in Sonnet 48, that beloved person is at once the precious object that may become the prey of a thief and an accessory to the crime, if not the very criminal. For all the anger that charges the line, those double roles also moderate guilt, much as Sonnet 35 shifts back and forth nervously between blaming and excusing.

In the sonnets I have scrutinized closely, the characteristics of thievery include secrecy and a nonlinear pattern of repeated robberies or repeated attempts to excuse them; its consequences include conflations of apparently opposite categories and confusions about agency that are both source and result of confusions about guilt. These qualities recur in the many brief references to that crime that are threaded through this cycle of poems. Sonnet 99, for example, is on one level a courtly compliment that waltzes to the music of the conceit that all the beauties of nature derive from the beloved—“buds of marjerom had stol'n thy hair” (1. 7), and so on. That pleasing if unoriginal premise explains why the violet is called “Sweet thief” (1. 2). These threats to categories and the ethical judgments that result from them remain only the faintest hint in this trifling trifle of a poem. And yet the context of references to thievery in other Shakespearean sonnets activates the destabilization latent in Sonnet 99; it becomes an undertow that can draw us a little nearer the deep waters of deceit and treachery in other sonnets.

Placing these opening lines in the context of A Midsummer Night's Dream brings other disturbing possibilities to the surface. When Titania orders her retinue to keep Bottom in something other than the style to which he is accustomed, her instructions take for granted a form of thievery:

The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees.
And for night-tapers crop their waxen thighs, …
And pluck the wings from painted butterflies,
To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes.

(III.i.168-69, 172-73)

Even a charter member of the Sierra Club should be able to admit that these tropes are primarily playful; the tone of the passage mandates against solemn disapproval. And yet these lines, like so much else in the woods, invoke violence and loss in a context where they could easily have been avoided: Titania might well have spoken of borrowing the honeybags from willing bees and asking the butterflies to do the fanning themselves. Instead she, like the speaker in Sonnet 99, creates a world of scarcity and competition whose denizens steal rather than share. It is what Katharine Eisaman Maus describes in the very different context of Jonson's plays and poems as an economy of scarcity in which “what one person has, another cannot have.”⁴⁰

Time, like Nature, is a thief in Shakespeare's sonnets, but unlike the violet in Sonnet 99, it is an unambiguously dread criminal. Other types of ambiguity and ambivalence, however, surface in Sonnet 104 when the speaker laments, “Ah, yet doth beauty, like a dial hand, / Steal from his figure, and no pace perceiv'd” (II. 9 and 10). If the fact that the effects of time cannot be seen makes them less threatening in one sense, in another sense the element of stealth yet again creates more fear. Notice, too, how the simile conflates “beauty” (1. 9), which may either refer to an abstract quality or may synecdochically evoke the beloved, and time: thus the victim may again be the thief.

Not surprisingly, the Dark Lady is cast as yet another thief in this overpopulated den of them:

not from those lips of thine,
That have profan'd their scarlet ornaments,
And seal'd false bonds of love as oft as mine,
Robb'd others' beds' revenues of their rents.

(142.5-8)

Here, as in so many of Shakespeare's plays, love in general and adultery in particular are presented as forms of robbery in language that conflates material and marital loss. Line eight suggests that in the heart's forests, as in the forests of A Midsummer Night's Dream, an economy of scarcity and distrust that permits one to get only by taking and to own only by robbing prevails. It is telling, too, that the subject of “Robb'd” (1. 8) is the lips: here, as in several of the passages I have examined so far, thievery is connected with lying and deceiving.

If one interprets robbery broadly, Shakespeare's sonnets not only stage that crime in the ways I have been tracing but enact it as well structurally. The many conclusions that either unsettle the sonnet structure by establishing lines twelve to fourteen or line fourteen itself as the syntactical unit rather than the couplet might be said to perform an action analogous to robbery: they open the neatly packaged ideas to interrogation, thus stealing away what readers thought they possessed. Or one might suggest that the couplet itself is potentially an enclosed treasure, a jewel of epigrammatic certainty, a locked chest that we might hope to survey as does the miser in Sonnet 52. But this treasure is repeatedly stolen just as frustrated or troubled readers reach out for it. These disruptions are rendered more, not less, unsettling by the fact that, as Helen Vendler has demonstrated, the couplets are often closely related to the rest of the poem through what she terms a “couplet tie,” notably patterns of repetition.⁴¹ As she points out, it is inaccurate to dismiss the couplets as superfluous or inconsistent; but, I would add, their verbal links to the bodies of the sonnets make their attacks on the preceding quatrains all the more startling.

Because thievery works these ways in the sonnets, it effects a reinterpretation of loss within the sequence. If loss is central to Petrarchism, it is unusually significant in this particular cycle of lyrics. Not only does its author explore the types of absence so pervasive in other sequences (the estrangement or disappearance of the beloved, of the ability to write, and so on). Types of deprivation that are less common in Petrarchism—the loss of generativity threatened in the procreation sonnets, the threats from Time, the results of competition with the Friend and with the Rival Poet, and the loss of the ideal vision described by Joel Fineman among others⁴²—intensify the overwhelming preoccupation with what is gone, perhaps never to be attained again. Thievery, I have demonstrated, is typically cast as the source of many of these losses. Not fortune but a specified enemy is responsible. Thus Shakespeare's sonnets establish privation as the result of criminal actions by an antagonist. And thus they frequently demonstrate the transfer—the displacement—of guilt. But that transfer is not a smooth one: many of the epistemological crises in these poems whirl around the question of who is the thief.

IV

Tracing how Shakespeare's sonnets connect thievery to the breakdown of systems of classification and to forms of displacement suggests perspectives for future work on that crime in his plays and his culture, though a lengthy discussion of texts other than the sonnets is necessarily outside the scope of this essay. The most significant connection between the tavern and court in the Henriad is not that so many denizens of both worlds are thieves but rather that so many may or may not be: as in the sonnets, the actions they have apparently performed are hard to interpret or even attribute with certainty (in what sense, if any, was the prince really a robber at Gadshill? did or did not his father rob Richard II of the throne?) Once again thievery steals away epistemological and moral certainty. The way thievery is constructed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England also indicates that the relationship of The Merry Wives of Windsor to the Henriad may be more intimate than Shakespeareans generally acknowledge. For Falstaff does not simply trade his old role as highway robber for the status of would-be lover. Rather, his abortive romantic and economic plots render literal important characteristics of thievery; he is a displaced outsider intruding into the world of Windsor and a particular house within it. To say that he does not fit in the play is to ignore the fact that that is the very point: this drama, like the crime of burglary, pivots on an act of invasion. And Autolycus is also associated with the social and geographical forms of displacement that are, I am suggesting, so central to thievery.

Juxtaposing Shakespeare's plays with the sonnets can also provide an overview of why and how he associates thievery with entry into a forbidden place or displacement and with the epistemological destabilizations that result from category crises. The crime itself may involve the displacement of entering a forbidden place, and those who commit it are often represented as displaced vagrants, displaced knights and princes, or the implicitly displaced social superior evoked in Shakespeare's oxymoronic pun on “gentle thief” (40.9). Autolycus had been Florizel's servant, and, as Harry Levin has pointed out, Falstaff is a knight without a horse.⁴³ Similarly, in The Merry Wives of Windsor Falstaff is displaced from another type of play. Such perpetrators further violate place by confusing the demarcation between inside and outside. Tarquin intrudes into Lucrece's house and her bedchamber as well as her body. In so doing the thieves violate place epistemologically as well: their crime is repeatedly connected with category crises, such as the blurring of pastoral and picaresque in The Winter's Tale or of self and other in Sonnet 35. And in thus compromising systems of evaluation and classification, Shakespeare's thieves are prone to intrude within and corrupt a particularly precious or even sacred place, whether it be a nation or a woman's body. Et in Arcadia ego.

As I have observed, thievery is so intimately connected to issues of place in part because it is sexualized. Sexual penetration is the underlying event behind many references to inside and outside, the primal scene about which the narratives of thievery hint: Shakespeare's characters repeatedly trope not only adultery but also courtship as a kind of thievery, while thievery itself is sometimes presented as a sexual crime, notably when Autolycus talks about gelding. But in the case of this social phenomenon like so many others, issues of sex and gender represent an essential but not exclusive perspective. First of all, the assumption that sexuality is invariably the subtext of robbery would demonstrate the less benign effects of twentieth-century popular Freudianism. Not only is a cigar sometimes only a cigar; to a dedicated tobacco grower, might not a penis sometimes represent a cigar rather than vice versa? In other words, given the deep tensions associated with robbery in Tudor and Stuart England, it is possible that sometimes sexual invasion was fraught precisely because it represented robbery. The tenor and the vehicle that is apparently securely attached behind it may jackknife on the slippery roads of Tudor and Stuart culture, flip over, and change places. Furthermore, that reversal may recur several times: we need to think not in terms of a static system in which the secondary meaning encodes the primary one but rather in terms of a dynamic process, a continuing journey on those perilous highways.

Another argument against assuming that all thievery encodes burglary and all burglary sexuality is crystallized by King Lear, which demonstrates that other valences of the crime may be equally significant. Shakespeare's Edmund is as hungry for the social place denied him as for the forfended place between the legs of the king's two elder daughters that is not denied him. And to Shakespeare's audience the word “place” and the concept behind it was social in several senses. Thieves literally enter forfended places in part because their crime is so often associated with or generated by struggles for a social place that is figured as a spatial one: the house of a social superior, the country from which Bolingbroke is exiled.

The references to thievery in Shakespeare's sonnets, then, crystallize some explanations for the frequency with which his other texts refer to it and the intensity with which his culture fears it. His tropes demonstrate that this felony was both a clear and present danger in Tudor and Stuart England and a symbol for many other perils. The loss of property and the loss of stable systems of valuation, threats about sexuality and about social status, place and displacement, and insiders and outsiders all intersect and interact on the “thievish ways” of Shakespeare's sequence and his culture. …

Notes

1. I would like to thank Professors Achsah Guibbory, Donald Rowe, and Linda Woodbridge for useful suggestions about this essay; I am also indebted to Professor Woodbridge for sharing her work-in-progress on homelessness with me. I am grateful as well to my research assistant, Elizabeth Lamont. All citations from Shakespeare are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

2. English law carefully distinguishes the several crimes categorized as thievery; burglary, for example, involves entering a building under specified conditions, and robbers, unlike larceny includes violence or intimidation. Throughout this chapter I attempt to retain the legal usages of these terms and therefore use “thievery for the overarching category even at the price of occasional repetitiveness.

3. One important exception, which I read only after completing this essay, is the discussion of thievery in Patricia Parker, Shakespeare From the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996), esp. pp. 121 -31, 150-74. The contexts she establishes for that crime, which include adultery, conveying, and translating, are significantly different from but compatible with my own emphases.

4. The concept has been deployed by a number of critics; one particularly influential instance is Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992).

5. The literature evaluating these records is extensive. See, e.g., J. M. Beattie, “The Pattern of Crime in England 1600-1800” Past and Present, no. 62 (1974), 52-58; J. S. Cockburn, “The Nature and Incidence of Crime in England 1559-1625: A Preliminary Survey,” in J. S. Cockburn, ed., Crime in England 1550-1800 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977), esp. pp. 49-55; V. A. C. Gatrell and T. B. Hadden, “Criminal Statistics and Their Interpretation,” in Nineteenth-Century Society: Essays in the Use of Quantitative Methods for the Study of Social Data, ed. E. A. Wrigley (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1972); J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England 1550-1750 (London: Longman, 1984), esp. Chaps. 1, 3. The issue of the designation “laborer” is discussed in Victor Bailey, “Crime, Criminal Justice and Authority in England,” Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, 40 (198o), 39

6. See, e.g., Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 4-5.

7. On the prevalence of crime in market towns, see Joel Samaha, Law and Order in Historical Perspective: The Case of Elizabethan Essex (New York: Academic Press, 1974), p. 21.

8. Samaha, Law and Order p. 22.

9. J. A. Sharpe, “The History of Crime in Late Medieval and Early Modern England: A Review of the Field,” Social History, 7 (1982), 190.

10. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England, p. 56.

11. Tudor Royal Proclamations: The Later Tudors, Vol. 3, ed. Paul L. Hughes and James E Larkin, C. S. V. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), p. 2 i8 (#804).

12. See, e.g., Cynthia B. Herrup, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 169-71.

13. See Arthur-J. Lurigio, “Are All Victims Alike? The Adverse, Generalized, and Differential Impact of Crime,” Crime and Delinquency, 33 (1987), 464; Dean G. Kilpatrick, Benjamin E. Saunders, Lois J. Veronen, Connie L. Best, Judith M. Von et al., “Criminal Victimization: Lifetime Prevalence, Reporting to Police, and Psychological Impact,” Crime and Delinquency, 33 (1987), esp. 485.

14. See, e.g., Herrup, The Common Peace, pp. 31-33 15. This is one of the few issues on which students of crime come close to unanimity.

15. See, e.g., Cynthia B. Herrup, “Law and Morality in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present, no. 106 (1985), 118.

16. William Lambard, Eirenarcha: or of The Office of the Justices of Peace (London, 1581), p. 198. Additional references to this book will appear within my text. In citing all Renaissance texts, I retain the original spelling but regularize i/j and u/v.

17. William Lambard, The Duties of Constable, Borsholders, Tithing-men, and Such Other Lowe Ministers of the Peace (London, 1584), p. 13.

18. OED, s.v. “strange.”

19. I am indebted to the work of the literary critics who have commented on the literature of roguery in recent years; they have, however, devoted little attention to the issue of thievery. Thomas Harman, a sixteenth-century ‘writer who describes rogues and vagabonds, is discussed in one of Stephen Greenblatt's most influential essays, “Invisible Bullets,” which first appeared in Glyph, 8 (1981), 40-61; was reprinted in revised form in a number of collections, including Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds., Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York: Methuen, 1985), and Peter Erickson and Coppelia Kahn, eds., Shakespeare's “Rough Magic”: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1985); and also appears in Greenblatt's Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 188). Greenblatt's suggestion that Harman is as much a dissembler as the villains he chronicles might be related to my arguments about insiders and outsiders. Recent studies of rogues and vagabonds include William C. Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996); Patricia Fumerton, “Not Home: Alehouses, Vagrancy, and Broadside Ballads,” presented in 1995 at the “Material London ca. 1600” conference at the Folger Institute (I am grateful to her for making her essay available to me before publication); Barbara A. Mowat, “Rogues, Shepherds, and the Counterfeit Distressed: Texts and Infracontexts of The Winter's Tale 4.3,” Shakespeare Studies, 22 (1994), 58-76.

20. A. L. Beier, “Vagrants and the Social Order in Elizabethan England,” Past and Present, no. 64 (1974), 3-29, and Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560-1640 (London: Methuen, 1985).

21. The text was apparently originally published in 1566, but the only extant version is dated 1567.

22. The publication history of these treatises is also complex and vexed. See Francis R. Johnson, “The Editions of Robert Greene's Three Parts of ‘Conn,v-Catching’: A Bibliographical Analysis,” The Library, 9 (1954), 17-24

23. See, e.g., Gamini Salgado, The Elizabethan Underworld (London: J. M. Dent and Totowa, NJ.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977); also cf. the defense, though qualified, of the accuracy of these pamphlets in Frank Aydelotte, Elizabethan Rogues and Vagabonds (1913; rpt. London: Frank Cass and Co., 1967), pp. 77-78.

24. Among the many books and articles presenting this argument are Bailey, “Crime, Criminal Justice and Authority in England,” esp. pp. 37-38; and two studies by Beier: “Vagrants and the Social Order” and Masterless Men, esp. Chap. 8. John L. McMullan at tempts to negotiate a middle-of-the-road position on the existence of the type of offenses the literature of roguery details; he argues that organized crime did exist but was local rather than constituting a unified subculture (“Criminal Organization in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century London,” Social Problems, 29 [1982], 311-23; The Canting Crew: London's Criminal Underworld 1550-1700 [New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1984]). His arguments are, however, limited by their lack of specificity and precision about dates.

25. Similarly, in studying criminal biographies from a somewhat later period, Lincoln B. Faller traces how they developed myths (Turned to Account: The Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987]).

26. Kai T. Erickson, Wayward Purtans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: Macmillan, 1966), esp. Chap. 1.

27. For example, in Vagrants and Vagrancy in England, 1598-1664,” Paul A. Slack reports that a group of Salisbury vagrants contained a cohort of Irishmen (Economic History Review, 2d series, 27 [1974], 365).

28. For this usage of “black art,” see, e.g., the title page of Greene's Second Part of Conny-Catching(London, 1591).

29. Thomas Harman, A Caveat for Commen Cursetors (London, 1567), sig.:ii,. Subsequent references to this book will appear within my text.

30. See, e.g., Robert Greene, A Notable Discovery of Coosenage (London, 1591), pp. 8-9.

31. [Thomas Dekker], The Belman of London (London, 1608).

32. The issue of valuation in the sonnets is discussed in Lars Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990, Chap. 2.

33. This shift is one of the central arguments of Joel Fineman, Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986).

34. Compare Stephen Booth's comments on the competitive assigning of guilt in this poem (Stephen Booth, ed., Shakespeare's Sonnets [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977], 191-92).

35. Booth, Shakespeare's Sonnets, pp. 211, 212.

36. I am indebted to John Klause for useful comments about Sonnet 138, as well as many other questions about these sonnets.

37. Compare Thomas M. Greene's perceptive analysis of patterns of cost and expense in the poems (“Pitiful Thrivers: Failed Husbandry in the Sonnets,” in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds., Shakespeare and the Question of Theory [New York: Methuen, 1985]).

38. Edward Hobler, The Sense of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1952), pp. 95-109.

39. References to storage containers are also noted by Bruce R. Smith in Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 254-55. He suggests that the locked treasure may sometimes refer to the male genitals.

40. Katharine Eisaman Maus, “Satiric and Ideal Economies in the Jonsonian Imagination,” ELR, 19 (1989), 45.

41. Helen Vendler, “Reading, Stage by Stage: Shakespeare's Sonnets,” in Russ McDonald, ed., Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994), P 37

42. Fineman, Shakespeare's Perjured Eye.

43. Harry Levin, Shakespeare and the Revolution of the Times: Perspectives and Commentaries (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 121-30. The chapter in question originally appeared as “Falstaff Uncolted,” AILA; 61 (1946), 305-10.