he proposes further that the legal and financial imagery, along with a "coolly ironic" tone, disguises the speaker's true feelings which only fully appear in the couplet: "Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter,/ In sleep a king, but waking no such matter." The couplet reveals that the speaker understands that the young man never fully gave himself. In this interpretation the legal and financial imagery of the three quatrains are more self-protective than sincere. Murray Krieger offers a different view of the contract theory seen within Sonnet 87. In his analysis, he focuses his attention on the use of the word "dear" within the first line. He notes that the reader's initial deduction of the word "dear" implies the idea of affection. But this initial impression of the word on the reader is immediately confronted by the word "estimate", which essentially uncovers the reality of the speaker's lowly position to the young man. Kreiger furthermore notes that the legal and financial terms strongly imply the poet's bitterness towards his position: "at having love's world of troth reduced to the niggardly world of truth, the world of faith to the world of fact". Couplet Though Vendler and Booth understand the legal imagery in a similar fashion, they differ in their understanding of the couplet. Vendler proposes that the couplet has a defective key word. Vendler identifies "gift" as the key word of the sonnet as "gift" and its variants "gives" and "gav'st" appear in all three quatrains in lines 3, 7, 9, 10, and 11. However, this key word is defective because it is absent in the couplet. Its absence in the couplet reflects the desertion of the "gift", the young man. Booth understands the couplet to have sexual overtones. In the phrase, "I had thee as a dream" Booth suggests that "had" means "possessed sexually" or "embraced". Sexual dreams were a common Renaissance topic and Booth suggests that Shakespeare is playing on this usage. He cites Spenser's The Faerie Queene 1.1.47-49, Jonson's The Dream, Herrick's The Vine, Othello 3.3.416-432, and Gascoigne's Supposes, 1.2.133 as contemporary works that contain sexual dreams. Booth also proposes that "matter" in the closing line has a sexual meaning in addition to meaning "real substance". Here he cites examples of matter being used in its sexual sense in Hamlet 3.2.111: "country matter" and Julius Caesar 1.1.23: "women matters". Richard Strier additionally notes