Medcalf, Stephen. "Shakespeare on Beauty, Truth and Transcendence." John Roe. ed. The Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.

(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)

Venus, in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, is given subtle understanding of the Neoplatonic doctrine that beauty is an absolute quality which is conferred from on high on to other qualities like pleasingness of color and proportion, from which it is distinct.

...his breath and beauty set

Gloss on the rose, smell to the violet.

While without him 

The flowers are sweet, their colors fresh and trim,

but true sweet beauty lived and died with him. (1079-80)

 ...sonnet 53...transforms it into a paradoxical, but much more serious play with Platonic logic....beloved young man as...reality behind not only Adonis, the paradigm of male beauty, but Helen, the paradigm of female beauty; not only...human beauty,...spring and autumn;... 'beauty'...also... 'bounty'. 

Hoby, rendering Castiglione's Courtier and indirectly Plato's Symposium, ...'the beawtye unseperable from the high bountye'....not only as if he were the Beautiful itself, but as the Good...

118

...'strange shadows', recalls Plato's...Cave in Republic vii...

Plato's logically...concept ...imitation ('counterfeit' and painting)...participation ('In all external grace you have some part') (Parmenides 131-2, Republic 10)...

...logical relation which underlines them all, i.e. likeness: 'But you like none, none you for constant heart'.

Form of the beautiful should not be, like its particulars, that of being subject to transience.

The uncanny alliance of mystery and logic in this sonnet approaches Plato's higher flights so nearly as to suggest that Shakespeare had  been improving his knowledge of him: a suggestion confirmed by The Phoenix and the Turtle, which he published in 1601...

...possible that it was Ben Jonson himself who introduced Shakespeare to Plato in Latin...they collaborated in the volume Love's Martyr in which The Phoenix and the Turtle appeared...

119

The Masque of Beauty (1608) and Loves Triumph through Callipolis (1630) - are expositions of Plato on love...latter...how love drives false followers of his out of Plato's ideal city. The New Inne (1629)...Lovel describes love, following the Symposium closely, and ...Ficino' commentary...Jonson is anticipating a new fashion for spiritual, Platonic love based on Honore d'Urfe's pastoral romance Astree...Davenant's masque The Temple of Love in 1635...

An anti-Platonic Lord Beaufort...conjuring up Chapman's Ovids Banquet of Sence

I relish not these philosophical feasts;

give me a banquet o'sense, like that of Ovid

(The New Inne, III, ii, 125-6)

Lovel's Ficinian lines ...into the The Phoenix and the Turtle.  Love is...

...a flame, and ardor of the mind.

dead, in the proper corps, quick in anothers;

Transferres the Louer into the Loued.

The, he, or she, that loues engraues, or stamps

Th'Idea of what they loue, first in themselves:

or, like to glasses, so their minds take in

The formes of their belou'd and them reflect (III, ii. 96-102) 

Nature, fearing that the Phoenix of the present will have no successor, causes her union with the Turtle dove.  They join in the mutual flame of love and death which Shakespeare celebrates.  The story continues after him with the poems by Marston, Chapman and Jonson celebrating the appearance of a new Phoenix...

120

...enchanted purity which belongs to the songs of Ariel, songs that express the non-human life of an elemental spirit, an emanation of Renaissance Neoplatonism..  The first five verses of The Phoenix and the Turtle summon up a child's equivalent.. emblematic birds in place of spirits.  The anthem...more genuinely Neoplatonic, resembling both Ficino and The New Inne.

...Shakespeare once again picks up the paradoxical identification of the beloved with Beauty.

Sonnet 53

121

'Truth may seem but cannot be' (62) a gnomic statement of the place of Truth in the world of appearance which concentrates a great deal of Plato...Phaedrus ...Beauty alone of the forms shines ' most clearly through the clearest of our senses

Beauty brag, but 'tis not she;

Truth and beauty buried be (63-4)

This last line of a very platonic verse is signaled as a Platonic allegory by its logical incompatibility on the literal level with what follows: 'For these dead birds sigh a prayer'(67)...lamentation for the absence of perfect Truth and Beauty

Phoenix is calling the other birds to its own funeral, the priest it calls is the swan, who sings only when it dies...Reason recognizes that it is confounded by love, does it make its lament...

...nature's, reason's, identity's business to transcend itself...

...childlike purity of its language...scholastic subtleties and the nursery-rhyme simplicity of it thought...paradoxes which descend from Aquinas on the Trinity, Plotinus, and Plato.

122

Plato...put his philosophy forward not as a code of doctrine, but dramatically as a set of explorations, in dialogues that look like plays.   Shakespeare...within a year...The Phoenix and the Turtle...play in which people try to argue philosophically - Troilus and Cressida...

...Ulysses' speech on degree, the Trojan debate about the continuance of the war which becomes a discussion of value, and Ulysses' argument with Achilles...need to demonstrate one's qualities publicly.

Kenneth Palmer...Hector's last speech in favor of returning Helen which begin with an appeal to Aristotle, are so packed with arguments and ideas from Books 1-5 of Nicomachean Ethics as to suggest Shakespeare direct acquaintance with those books,...

The dialogue of Plato's which is powerfully present in Troilus and Cressida...Ficino's Euthyphro...

This, she? No, this is Diomed's Cressida.

If beauty have a soul, this is not she,

if souls guide vows, if vows be sanctimonies,

If sanctimony be the gods' delight

if there be rule in unity itself

This is not she. (vii 136-141)

 

...Troilus knows that it is Cressida whom he has seen: but Cressida is beautiful, and beauty expresses the soul.  Souls express themselves in vows.  Therefore, if Cressida breaks vows, her soul cannot be her soul:

'Sanctimony' is a word which Shakespeare only uses three times, all three probably within a year or two of each other.

...question of Socrates in the Euthyphro:  'Is what is holy holy because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it is holy?