Mirror for Lovers
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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’s Symposium. 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 in The Symposium. Born anew in its medieval reincarnations (The Romance of the Rose, The Vita Nuova, and The Canzoniere of Petrarch), the tradition begun in Plato’s Symposium was then resuscitated in the Elizabethan sonnet sequence revival, most notably in Shake-speare’s Sonnets. With extended examination of all the texts in the Q manuscript, A Mirror for Lovers makes 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.
William F. Zak (PhD, University of Michigan) is Emeritus Professor of English at Salisbury University in Maryland. Thinking and writing about Shakespeare's sonnets have absorbed the greater part of his working energies since his retirement from teaching in 2002. His previous work includes a study of King Lear entitled Sovereign Shame (Bucknell, 1984) and The Polis and the Divine Order: The Oresteia, Sophocles, and the Defense of Democracy (Bucknell, 1995). Currently he is completing monographs on Antony and Cleopatra and on Hamlet.