The Elizabethan period, a dynamic era in which literature and specially poetry flourished, has been the center of focus in many research projects. The aim of the present thesis was to analyze the selected sonnets composed by two Elizabethan sonneteers, Sydney and Spenser, based on Van Leeuwen’s Critical Discourse Analysis theory in order to reconstruct the underlying discourse through which the social actors were represented. To this end, following an overview of Leeuwen’s sociosemantic model in the present project, an analysis of the representation of the social actors was conducted. The results of the analysis indicated an identical pattern of representation in all of the sonnets: while the masculine social actors were legitimized as the central voice, the female social actors were marginalized and unvoiced. This proved that there were ideological implications in the representation of the social actors in the sonnets. In conclusion, it was finally argued that the mentioned pattern of representation provided an image of power relations in the Elizabethan era in which the social actors were empowered or disempowered according to their gender.
