does Shakespeare intend to love to the bitter end, but also he proposes to demolish the edifice of his own ego by this process of identification with the Friend" and that if we do not understand this "we have little chance of understanding the Sonnets as a whole." In 1924 T.G. Tucker noted that "double-vantage" is from tennis, and apparently means that I, your opponent, myself get "vantage" every time I thus yield it to you". In 2009 Fred Blick found, based on his research into the tennis of Shakespeare's time, that "double-vantage" meant a win i.e. two vantage points in succession after a score of deuce (reflected in the sonnet's number 8 – 8) to win a "set", just as it means today. The word "set" then also meant a bet or stake (see OED, v. B. trans., 14, and the Fool in King Lear, "Set less than thou throwest", presumably at dice, I, iv, 123). Tennis was in Shakespeare's day almost always played as a gamble or "set", hence the origin of the scoring call "game and set". This casts a new light on the typically Shakespearean resonance of the words in line 1, "set me light" (bet against me at scornful odds) and line 6, "set down". Fred Blick has also shown that after sonnet 88 the speaker of the sonnets becomes more critical of the addressee and less subservient to him. Sonnet 126, at the end of the Fair Youth sequence, finally condemns to mortality the "lovely boy" as a mere human, no more than an equal of the mortal speaker. Helen Vendler notes that the "doubling vantage that is the theme of the sestet of 88 helps to organize the whole Sonnet". References Further reading British poems Sonnets by William Shakespeare