“Two loves I have”: classification struggle in the Sonnets

This chapter makes more explicit the intersection of social position, gender, and economic language in sonnet sequences by looking at Shakespeare's Sonnets. We have already seen that the recourse to financial metaphors is a central component of the imaginative construction of social space in sonnet sequences in this period. Biblical interpretation in Lok's work is aligned with commodity circulation. Astrophil's interaction with Stella takes the form of his succumbing to “Reason's audit,” a procedure that makes clear his dependence upon Stella's feminine “riches.” Daniel represents Delia as an account book, and Spenser's Amoretti and Epithalamion invokes new conceptions of capital and land possession in the speaker's desire for his lady. In each case, social distinctions are also partly set in motion by gender distinctions, and both are intimately related to a financial language – the “use,” “accounts,” and “audits” that compulsively appear in these works. Such economic language pervades Shakespeare's Sonnets, as a number of studies have detailed. What has been less remarked on is the function of this language in producing, rather than reflecting, a social position; my interest in this chapter is less the economy, the market, or usury as autonomous discourses, than the social position that emerges from Shakespeare's appropriation of them.

The production of this social position is apparent when we focus on the form of the Sonnets.