SOURCE: Davidson, Clifford. “Timon of Athens: The Iconography of False Friendship.” Huntington Library Quarterly 43, no. 3 (summer 1980): 181-200.

In the following essay, Davidson interprets the title figure in Timon of Athens as a Renaissance emblem of failed friendship.

The realization that iconographic tableaux appear at central points in the drama of Shakespeare no longer seems to involve a radical critical perspective. Thus a recent study is able to show convincingly that the playwright presented audiences with a Hamlet who upon his first appearance on stage illustrated what the Renaissance would certainly have recognized as the melancholic contemplative personality.¹ As I have noted in a previous article, the hero of Macbeth when he sees the bloody dagger before him is in fact perceiving the image which most clearly denotes tragedy itself; in the emblem books, the dagger is indeed the symbol of tragedy,² which will be Macbeth's fate if he...