‘In thievish ways’: Tropes and Robbers in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Early Modern England

Summary

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)

Few members of Shakespeare’s original or twentieth-century audience would be likely to list a promenade ‘in thievish ways’ (79) as their favourite 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.

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’ (IV.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 behaviour 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.

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.