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...