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Miscellaneous Shakespeare and the Ideal of Love   by Jill Line $16.95 / Inner Taditions/ 2006 Plays such as Hamlet, As You Like It, and The Tempest remain crowd-pleasers to this day. Some may believe this is because of Shakespeare’s sublime ability with verse. But in Shakespeare and the Ideal of Love, author Jill Line suggests that the Bard's dramaturgy tapped into the philosophical current which inspired mystics such as Hermes Tristmegistus, Pythagoras, and Plato. To explore Platonic influences on Shakespeare’s work, Line focuses on a 15th-century Italian scholar-priest and mystic Marsilio Ficino. Little known today, Ficino’s Platonic Academy sparked a revolution in Florentine art and culture. In 1578, Sears Jayne translated Ficino’s De Amore into English as Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love. As a result, a whole generation of English poets and dramatists, including Shakespeare, were exposed to Christian Platonism. The intricate plots and subplots of works such as Love's Labours Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream may seem, at first glance, like witty entertainment. But upon further examination, these machinations reveal the influence of Platonic mysticism. In finding and winning their beloved, the heroes of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies were also perfecting themselves. Through love, they see beyond the outer shell into the true Being of their beloved. While his contemporary Ben Jonson openly toasted “the Platonicks’ opinion” in the notes to his Masques of Beauty, Shakespeare was never so open in his praise. But Line’s Platonic interpretations of major Shakespearean works such as Hamlet—and minor ones such as Coriolanus—are sensible and thought-provoking. It could be that Shakespeare was a secret admirer of Platonism; it could be that he absorbed many of these concepts in conversations with his peers. But after reading Shakespeare and the Ideal of Love, you will find it much easier to spot glimpses of the eternal and timeless in Shakespeare's work. — K. Filan

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