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...