Meaning & Analysis
To be tricked, betrayed, or bartered away—treated as an object of trade rather than as an ally or equal.
Insights
Betrayal for profit
Allies ‘sell’ you to enemies or rivals for gain—money, favor, status—reducing loyalty to a market transaction.
Corruption and bribery
Public trust or private fidelity is compromised by payoffs; decisions are purchased, and persons become commodities.
Loss of agency
To be ‘bought and sold’ is to be acted upon, not acting—your fate is traded over your head by those with leverage.
Humiliation and exposure
The phrase brands one a dupe, publicly revealed as outmaneuvered; the sting lies in the social knowledge that a price was set and met.
Market metaphor as moral verdict
Commerce supplies the grammar of treachery: buying/selling maps neatly onto betrayal because it imagines loyalty as a fungible good with a price.
Early modern politics
In patronage societies, offices, votes, and military loyalties were notoriously purchasable; the idiom flourished as a shorthand for sellout deals struck in chambers and camps.
Shakespearean resonance
Onstage cries like ‘You are bought and sold!’ compress panic, treason, and scorn into one blow, treating sudden reversals as market flips in allegiance.
Publicness of the wrong
The power of the phrase is reputational: it doesn’t merely claim harm, but announces that one’s worth has been priced, turning private treachery into communal shame.
From transaction to typology
Beyond a single act, the idiom names a type—the sellout—whose identity is defined by a willingness to convert relationships into cash or clout.
Rhetorical Devices
Metaphor
Turns betrayal into a commercial exchange, making moral violation concrete and countable.
Meristic pairing
The fixed duo ‘bought and sold’ gives rhythmic finality, implying a complete process—from acquisition to disposal—of a person’s loyalty.
Passive construction
Cast in the passive voice, it highlights victimhood and invisibility of the agents who trade you away.
Hyperbole
No literal sale occurs; exaggeration heightens the sense of total commodification and disgrace.
Irony
Commerce, which should organize goods, here organizes treachery; the respectable language of trade indicts moral bankruptcy.
Transcription
Quotations
I tell you the mater is bought and solde.
I drede we are bought and solde.
That were at a conuention heauen to bye and sell.
Than will the pikthank it tell To your moste enmies, you to bie and sell.
Marcus doth buy and sell me.
You are bought and sold like sheepe in a market.
To be bought and sold in a company.
No matter how I look; I am bought and sold.
Shakespeare Citations
It would make a man mad as a buck to be so bought and sold.
Whither were you sent? —Whither, my lord? From bought and sold Lord Talbot.
Fly, noble English; you are bought and sold!
Be not so bold, For Dickon thy master is bought and sold.
Thou art bought and sold among those of any wit.
Explanation
[To be tricked.]
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.