The Discursive Representation of the Social Actors in Edmund Spenser’s and Sir Philip Sidney’s Love Sonnets

The aim of this quantative-qualitative research is to analyze the selected sonnets composed by two Elizabethan sonneteers, Sir Philip Sydney and Edmund Spenser, based on Van Leeuwen’s Critical Discourse Analysis model in order to reconstruct the underlying discourse through which the social actors are represented. To this end, 16 sonnets (224 lines) have been critically analyzed using Van Leeuwen’s (2008) socio-semantic model of categories such as inclusion, exclusion; personalization; somatization, abstraction; overdetermination, activation, passivation, association, instumentalization, objectivation, backgrounding, anachronism, possessivation, and appraisement and Halliday & Matthiessen’s (2004) transitivity model (Material process, Mental process Verbal process, Relational process and Behavioral process). The results of the analysis indicate an identical pattern of representation in all of the sonnets: while the masculine social actors are legitimized as the central voice, the female social actors are marginalized and unvoiced. This proves that there are ideological implications in the representation of the social actors in the sonnets. In conclusion, it is finally argued that the mentioned pattern of representation provides an image of power relations in the Elizabethan era in which the social actors are empowered or disempowered according to their gender.