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This essay examines the concept of love and reads Shakespeare’s sonnets from the perspective of the ascent of love as presented in Plato’s myths of Eros. Though Plato’s influence persisted throughout the Western civilization, especially through the permeation into Christianity from the age of the Church Fathers, it was in the era of the Renaissance during which a complete collection of works by Plato was newly introduced to European countries. Once translated into Latin, a task which was first performed by the Italian Ficino, the collection had a great effect on the intellectual and aesthetical climate of the Renaissance. Among these different works, it was especially the concept of love and beauty as expressed in Symposium and Phaedrus that stimulated the aesthetic sensibility of poets and artists such as Shakespeare, who is considered to have been familiar with it as it is reflected in his works. The myths of Eros that are scattered throughout the Plato’s collection provide the relationship between love and beauty; e.g., love as the pursuit of beauty and eternity, the particular love for a beautiful young man that ascends to ideal love, and heavenly and earthly love. Of these, this essay attempts to focus on the ascent of love as reflected in Shakespeare’s sonnets, in which, similar to Plato’s perspective, the initiation of the narrator’s love by the young man’s beauty tends to develop into ideal love that extends beyond physical beauty and age. In the ascent of the narrator’s love memory plays an important role. First, the narrator retains his impressions of the young man’s beautiful appearances in his memory. However, in his memory, he not only retains the initial impressions of physical beauty but also those of abstract beauty that are distilled from all aspects of the young man and furthered into the generalization of beauty. The young man is eventually represented as the model or the substance of beauty from which individual beautiful things are derived, enabling the narrator to perceive the beauty that is reflected in the phenomenal world.
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Shakespeare’s sonnets, Plato, myths of Eros, the ascent of love, beauty, memory
