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.