William F. Zak's Books

A Mirror for Lovers

Shake-speare's Sonnets as Curious Perspective

By: William F. Zak

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A Mirror for Lovers

Shake-speare's Sonnets as Curious Perspective

By: William F. Zak

A Mirror for Lovers: Shake-speare's Sonnets as Curious Perspective, by William F. Zak, seeks to identify in Shake-speare'e sonnet sequence the structural and thematic features of the satirical tradition born in Plato's Symposium. Through this study, Zak traces the power of an idea to endure, re-animate, and enrich itself through time: Plato's discrimination of the true nature of love in The Symposium. Born anew in its medieval reincarnations (The Romance of the Rose, The Vita Nuova, and The Canzoniere of Petrarch), the tradition begun in Plato's Symposium was then resuscitated in the Elizabethan sonnet sequence revival, most notably in Shake-speare's Sonnets. With extended examination of all the texts in the Q manuscript, A Mirror for Lovers makes a case for the mutually illuminating relationship among the sonnets to the fair young man and the dark lady, "A Lover's Complaint," and the mysterious dedication that until now have never received attention as an integral symbolic matrix of meaning.

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Page Count

611

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield

Published Date

ISBN 10

0739175106

ISBN 13

9780739175101

Sovereign Shame

A Study of King Lear

By: William F. Zak

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Sovereign Shame

A Study of King Lear

By: William F. Zak

This study of King Lear emphasizes the fact that Cordelia Kent, and the Fool create a loving community from which Lear persistently flees, and seeks to explain his bizarre behavior not, as is sometimes done, by attributing unconscious incestuous desires to him, but by demonstrating that Lear's profound and tyrannizing shame originates in his metaphysical dread of personal worthlessness and a deep sense of being unworthy of love.

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Page Count

220

Publisher

Bucknell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0838750567

ISBN 13

9780838750568

Hamlet's Problematic Revenge

Forging a Royal Mandate

By: William F. Zak

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Hamlet's Problematic Revenge

Forging a Royal Mandate

By: William F. Zak

Hamlet's Problematic Revenge: Forging a Royal Mandate provides a new argument within Shakespearean studies that argues the oft-noted arrest of the play’s dramaturgical momentum, especially evident in Hamlet’s much delayed enactment of his revenge, represents in fact a succinct emblem of the “arrested development” in the moral maturity of the entire cast, most notably, Hamlet himself—as the unifying disclosure and tragic problem in the play. Settling for unreflective and short-sighted personal gratifications and cold comforts, they truantly elbow aside a more considerable moral obligation. Again and again, all yield this duty’s commanding priority to a childishly self-regarding fear of offending those in nominal positions of power and questionable positions of authority—figures, like Ophelia and Hamlet’s fathers, for instance, demanding an unworthy deference. While Hamlet fails to consider with loving regard the improved well-being of the larger community to which he owes his existence and, fails to interrogate the moral adequacy of the Ghost’s command of violent reprisal (two things he never does nor even contemplates doing), “all occasions” in the play “do inform against” him and merely “spur a dull revenge”—not, as he interprets his own words, arguing the need for greater urgency in his vendetta, but, instead, to “inform against” the criminality of that very course itself. His revenge therefore can be argued as “dull,” not because he cannot summon the wherewithal to enact it more bloodily, but because in obsessing about it ceaselessly he remains unreceptive to its “dull” or “unenlightened” opposition to the evil he hopes to eradicate. Hamlet does not avenge his father; this book argues that he becomes him. Amidst a wealth of previously unremarked figurative mirrorings, as well as much of the seemingly digressive material in Hamlet within Shakespearean studies, Hamlet’s Problematic Revenge brings to light a new interpretation of the tragic problem in the play.

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Page Count

151

Publisher

Lexington Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1498513115

ISBN 13

9781498513111

The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra

Asps amidst the Figs

By: William F. Zak

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The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra

Asps amidst the Figs

By: William F. Zak

This revaluation of Shakespeare’s most seductive tragedy, Antony and Cleopatra, allies itself with neither George Bernard Shaw and Philo’s Roman judgment of the lovers as “strumpet and fool”—premised on the idle sensuality and feckless self-regard ever evident in the regal pair—nor with the many at the opposite critical pole who have found themselves swept up, to some extent at least, in the “grand illusion” of the lovers themselves as peerless figures transcending the very deaths to which Caesar’s heartless predation drives them. Nor does it seek some middle way, settling into a comfortable agnosticism that claims the poet’s view of the pair remains too ambiguous to resolve. Instead, by mining a wealth of metaphoric cross-references and ironical, mirroring figurations provided by the tragedy’s subsidiary characterizations, this new analysis argues that Shakespeare’s assessment of the lovers is in fact unambiguous: Antony and Cleopatra unknowingly settle for functioning merely as two more of the play’s eunuchs fanning the flames of their self-destructive passions for one another when they could have realized the new heaven and new earth Antony promised his queen had their “intercourse” with one another been more vigorously complete. Not alone their deaths, but their entire experience is this play is but a search for “easy ways to die” rather than the quest is should have been to live more richly yet and generate new life beyond their respective notorieties as separate individuals to be celebrated.

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Page Count

173

Publisher

Lexington Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

149851037X

ISBN 13

9781498510370

Robert Frost’s Visionary Gift

Mining and Minding the Wonder of Unexpected Supply

By: William F. Zak

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Robert Frost’s Visionary Gift

Mining and Minding the Wonder of Unexpected Supply

By: William F. Zak

A revaluation of Frost’s major lyrics, Robert Frost’s Visionary Gift: Mining and Minding the Wonder of Unexpected Supply makes a case for Frost as America’s preeminent philosophical poet. William F. Zak provides groundbreaking analysis to well over one hundred of Frost’s lyrics.

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Page Count

423

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield

Published Date

ISBN 10

1793638306

ISBN 13

9781793638304

Robert Frost's Visionary Gift

Mining and Minding the Wonder of Unexpected Supply

By: William F. Zak

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Robert Frost's Visionary Gift

Mining and Minding the Wonder of Unexpected Supply

By: William F. Zak

A revaluation of Frost's major lyrics, Robert Frost's Visionary Gift: Mining and Minding the Wonder of Unexpected Supply makes a case for Frost as America's preeminent philosophical poet. William F. Zak provides groundbreaking analysis to well over one hundred of Frost's lyrics.

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Page Count

422

Published Date

ISBN 10

1793638292

ISBN 13

9781793638298

Book's by William F. Zak

A Mirror for Lovers

A Mirror for Lovers

Sovereign Shame

Sovereign Shame

Hamlet's Problematic Revenge

Hamlet's Problematic Revenge

The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra

The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra

Robert Frost’s Visionary Gift

Robert Frost’s Visionary Gift

Robert Frost's Visionary Gift

Robert Frost's Visionary Gift

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