A Mirror for Lovers

A Mirror for Lovers: Shake-speares Sonnets as Curious Perspective, by William F. Zak, seeks to identify in Shake-spearee sonnet sequence the structural and thematic features of the satirical tradition born in Platos Symposium. Through this study, Zak traces the power of an idea to endure, re-animate, and enrich itself through time: Platos 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 Platos Symposium was then resuscitated in the Elizabethan sonnet sequence revival, most notably in Shake-speares 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 Lovers Complaint, and the mysterious dedication that until now have never received attention as an integral symbolic matrix of meaning.