An Analysis Of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138

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Unlike most of the other sonnets which are full of love and praise, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138 is about a less than perfect relationship which is based on lies and is complicated and difficult, yet “both speakers practice, again and again, a self-deceptive illusion, compulsively complying with it rather than giving it up” (Vendler 294). They continue to flatter each other for the sake of their sexual needs and the persona simply ignores his mistress’s adultery. When we look at the first two lines of the first quatrain, we see that there is a mutual deception. The persona complains that when his lover swears that she is true and faithful to him, he believes her but at the same time knows that she is lying. It is a paradoxical situation and it gets more paradoxical when we see that Shakespeare’s use of the word ‘lie’ perhaps is not a coincidence, as it has both meanings which suit the themes in the sonnet. The first one is ‘to tell a lie’ and the other is ‘to lie down (with men)’. Considering this fact, it can be observed that there is a pun; the persona knows that his lady is lying with other men and tells him lies but he pretends to have believed her and seems to be comfortable with it. So he knows that she is lying in both meanings. In a purely logical way, the Liar’s paradox expressed in sonnet 138 situates the voice of the poet in an altogether different register […] If a poet says that what he says is true, then what he says is either true or false. In contrast, if a poet says that what he says is false, then what he says is neither true nor false but both of these together in an irresolvably self-conscious and paradoxical fashion. This is the deliberately trivial and witty logical gambit of sonnet 138, distinguished only […] by the fact that the poet in the sonnet tries to take it seriously (Fineman 283). The situation continues when we look at the word

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