The Drama in Shakespeares Sonnets: A Satire to Decay is a work of detective scholarship. Unable to believe that Englands great dramatist would publish a sequence of sonnets without a plot, Mark Jay Mirsky, novelist, playwright, and professor of English, proposes a solution to a riddle that has frustrated scholars and poets alike. Arguing that the Sonnets are not just a higgledy piggledy collection of poems but were put in order by Shakespeare himself, and drawing on the insights of several of the Sonnets foremost contemporary scholars, Mirsky examines the Sonnets poem by poem to ask what is the story of the whole. Mirsky takes Shakespeare at his own word in Sonnet 100, where the poet, tongue in cheek, advises his lover to regard times spoilsin this case, any wrinkle graven in his cheekas but a satire to decay. The comfort is obviously double-edged, but it can also be read as a mirror of Shakespeares satire on himself, as if to praise his own wrinkles, and reflects the poets intention in assembling the Sonnets to satirize the playwrights own decay as a man and a lover.
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