Several of the sonnets are rife with financial imagery. Find as many examples of this imagery as you can, and try to account for their distribution within the sonnets.

A: Ask yourself: what does the poet wish to achieve by describing the sonnets’ characters and events with the language of money and finance? Consider Shakespeare’s time: the modern notion of economics is slowly taking shape, more and more sophisticated forms of trade are emerging, and a “philosophy” of money is not far away…