‘Of comfort and dispaire’: Plato’s Philosophy of Love and Shakespeare’s Sonnets

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