Abstract
Ben Jonson may have described Shakespeare as someone with ‘little Latine and lesse Greeke’, but he also, in the same breath, wished famous Greek and Roman writers to come back ‘to life again,/to hear [his] Buskin tread … shake the Scene’,1 presumably so that they could witness the good use to which Shakespeare had put their traditions. Recent Shakespearean scholarship has shown that Shakespeare’s engagement with the Classics was both extensive and original. James Shapiro suggests that a grammar school education ‘was roughly equivalent to a university degree today, with a better facility in Latin than that of a typical classics major’.2 The Sonnets have been linked with The Republic3 and The Symposium.4 The Republic has been linked with Julius Caesar and Troilus and Cressida,5 the latter also with Ficino’s translation and commentary on Euthryphro.6 Symposium and Euthryphro have been shown to have informed The Phoenix and the Turtle.7 Symposium, Phaedrus and Ion have all been explored in connection with A Midsummer Night’s Dream.8 Medcalf, Taylor and Grey have argued that Shakespeare had read Ficino’s 1484 translation of The Symposium9 and Jean de Serres’s Latin translation published in Paris in 1578.10 Bruce Clarke suggests Shakespeare knew Phaedrus via Apuleius’ The Golden Ass in Adlington’s 1566 translation.11 Finally, Barbara Everett correlates the two kinds of love Plato proposes in Phaedrus with the two beloveds of The Sonnets, allocating the ‘love right fair’ to the young man, and the love ‘coloured ill’ to the dark lady.12
The quotation in the title comes from William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 144. All references to The Sonnets are from William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2003 [1997]).
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Notes
James Shapiro, Contested Will, Who Wrote Shakespeare (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 276;
also Colin Burrow, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2013), 2, 98 and 107.
Paul Shorey, Platonism Ancient and Modern (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1938), 179–182.
Stephen Medcalf, ‘Shakespeare on Beauty, Truth and Transcendence’, in Platonism and the English Imagination, ed. A. Baldwin and S. Hutton (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 117–125.
Shorey, 118; I. A. Richards, ‘Troilus and Cressida and Plato’ in Speculative Instruments, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955), 198–203.
Jayne Sears, Ficino’s Commentary on Plato’s Symposium of Love (Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, 1985), 22; Medcalf, 123.
A. B. Taylor, ‘Plato’s Symposium and Titania’s Speech on the Universal Effect of her Quarrel with Oberon’, Notes and Queries 51.3 (2004), 276–278;
Richard Cody, The Landscape of the Mind: Pastoralism and Platonic Theory in Tasso’s Aminta and Shakespeare’s Early Comedies (Oxford: Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 144 and 146;
Bernard Quincy, ‘Plato and Shakespeare on Love’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 26.2 (2009), 103–120.
Bruce Clarke, Allegories of Writing: The Subject of Metamorphosis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), xi. The reference is to Apuleius, The. xi. bookes of the Golden asse … Translated out of Latine into Englishe by William Adlington (London: Henry VVykes, 1566).
Barbara Everett, ‘Good and Bad Loves: Shakespeare, Plato and the Plotting of the Sonnets’, Times Literary Supplement 5179 (2002), 13–15, at 14. Everett cites Sonnet 144, lines 3 and 4.
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (5.1,8–17), in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (New York; London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997). I have used this edition for citations from Shakespeare’s plays.
Dante Alighieri, Poem 13, La Vita Nuova, trans. Mark Musa (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Francesco Petrarch, Sonnet 134, Il Canzoniere, trans. Anthony Mortimer (London: Penguin, 2002).
Michael Drayton, Poem 50, Idea 1594, Minor Poems by Michael Drayton, ed. Cyril Brett (Oxford: Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907). See also Petrarch, Poem 74, Il Canzoniere, trans. by Anthony Mortimer (London: Penguin, 2002); Sir Philip Sidney, Poem 94, Astrophil and Stella, William J. Ringler, ed., The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Oxford: Clarendon Press 1962); Shakespeare, Sonnet 27, lines 1–4.
Galen, On the Affected Parts 6.5, cited by Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 20.
C. Burnett and D. Jacquart, eds, Constantine the African and ‘Alī ibn al-‘Abbās al-Magūsī: The Pantegni and Related Texts (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 167.
Andreas Capellanus, On Love, ed. and trans. G. Walsh (London: Duckworth, 1982); Bernard de Gordon, Opus Lilium medicinae inscriptum … (Lugduni: Apud Gulielmum Rovillium, 1550);
Jacques Ferrand, A Treatise on Lovesickness, ed. and trans. Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990 (1610); Pierre Pettit, De lacrymis libri tres (Parisiis: Apud Claudium Cramoisy, 1661); André du Laurens, Discours de la conservation de la veue; des maladies melancholiques; des catarrhes; et de la vieillesse. (Paris: Iamet Mettayer, 1597); Jean Aubery, L’Antidote d’amour (Paris: C. Chappelet, 1599); Jean de Veyries, La Généalogie de l’amour (Paris: A. L’Angelier, 1609).
Michal Altbauer-Rudnik, ‘Love, Madness and Social Order: Love Melancholy in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, Gesnerus 63.1–2 (2006) 33–45.
Thomas Aquinas. The Disputed Questions on Truth (De Veritate). 3 vol. Chicago: H. Regnery Co, 1952. v. 2. Questions x–xx, translated by J. V. MacGlynn.
Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press). See also A. D. Cousins, Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Narrative poems (Harlow; New York: Longman, 2000);
Peter Holbrook. Shakespeare’s Individualism (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Ovid, ‘Tereus, Procne and Philomela’, in Metamorphoses, trans A. D. Melville (Oxford University Press, 1986), 134–142.
Danijela Kambaskovic and Charles Wolfe, ‘From the Nobility of Sight to the Materialism of Touch’, A Cultural History of the Senses in the Renaissance, ed. Herman Roodenburg, vol. 3 (6 vols) (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 107–119.
See also John Dillon, The Middle Platonists, 80 BC to AD 220 (London: Duckworth, 1996);
Richard T. Wallis, Neo-Platonism (New York: Scriberner’s, 1972).
Plotinus, Ennead, III.5 ‘On Love’, trans. Stephen MacKenna (London: Faber, 1956); Ambrosius Aurelius Theodosius Macrobius. Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. William H. Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), book I, ch. 3, 87–92.
Mario Equicola, Libro di natura d’amore, cited in Charles Nelson, Renaissance Treatises on Love (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 70.
For details on this connection, see Charles Dahlberg, ‘Macrobius and the Unity of Roman de la Rose’, Studies in Philology 58.4 (1961), 573–582.
Lynn Enterline, ‘Embodied Voices: Petrarch Reading (Himself Reading) Ovid’, Desire in the Renaissance, Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed. Valeria Finuzzi and Regina Schwartz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 120–145.
Eileen Power, Medieval Women (Cambridge University Press, 2000 [1975]);
Georges Duby, Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Colin Burrow, ‘Introduction’, Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. C. Burrow (Oxford University Press), 91–137, at 125, note 2. In Italy, some lenience was shown to the passive partner, particularly if young. Guido Ruggiero, ‘Marriage, Love, Sex and Renaissance Civic Morality’, in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 10–30, at 24.
Richard Barnfield, The Affectionate Shepheard … Or The Complaint Of Daphnis For The Love Of Ganimede, ed. James Halliwell (London, reprinted … by T. Richards, 1845).
Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to Compete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Madhavi Menon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Paul Hammond, Figuring Sex Between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002);
Richard Burt, Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares, Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998).
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Kambaskovic, D. (2015). ‘Of comfort and dispaire’: Plato’s Philosophy of Love and Shakespeare’s Sonnets. In: White, R.S., Houlahan, M., O’Loughlin, K. (eds) Shakespeare and Emotions. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137464750_2
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