A Mirror for Lovers: Shake-speare's Sonnets as Curious Perspective

A Mirror for Lovers: Shake-speare’s Sonnets as Curious Perspective, by William F. Zak,seeks to identify in Shake-speare’e sonnet sequence the structural and thematic features of the satirical tradition born in Plato’sSymposium.Through this study, Zak traces the power of an idea to endure, re-animate, and enrich itself through time: Plato’s discrimination of the true nature of love inThe Symposium. Born anew in its medieval reincarnations (The Romance of the Rose, The Vita Nuova,andThe Canzoniereof Petrarch), the tradition begun in Plato’sSymposiumwas then resuscitated in the Elizabethan sonnet sequence revival, most notably inShake-speare’s Sonnets.With extended examination of all the texts in the Q manuscript,A Mirror for Loversmakes a case for the mutually illuminating relationship among the sonnets to the fair young man and the dark lady, “A Lover’s Complaint,” and the mysterious dedication that until now have never received attention as an integral symbolic matrix of meaning.