On Reception of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the Context of Plato’s ‘Symposium’: Semantics of the Characters and the Author’s Self. Part 1

The publication is the first part of the research comparing the semantics of the characters in Shakespeare’s sonnets with the semantics of Eros in Plato’s dialogue “Symposium”. Researchers conventionally derive their metaphysical interpretations of Fair Friend and Dark Lady from the antithesis of two Aphrodites in Pausanias’s speech and describe the two beloved as opposites. Our goal is to demonstrate that Shakespeare treats Plato’s philosophy in a far more subtle and complex way: he employs the qualities of ‘true’ and ‘false’ Eros from all speeches in the dialogue, which makes his personages polysemantic while wearing different masks. We draw on philosophical works by A. F. Losev and V. S. Soloviev to broaden the context of the reception of Shakespeare’s characters and reinterpret their relation and functions in a platonic perspective.