SOURCE: “Shakespeare and the Paragone: A Reading of Timon of Athens,” in Images of Shakespeare, edited by Werner Habicht, D. J. Palmer, and Roger Pringle, Associated University Presses, 1988, pp. 47-63.

In the following essay, Hunt discusses the role of the paragone, a historic comparison between and art and poetry, in Timon of Athens.

It is almost fifty years since in the Journal of the Warburg Institute Anthony Blunt noted that the opening of Timon of Athens signaled Shakespeare's acknowledgment of a Renaissance commonplace, the paragone or comparison between the arts.¹ But we have been surprisingly slow to do anything much with his observation.² It is not simply a question of why Shakespeare would alert his audiences to the paragone at the beginning of that particular play, but why the paragone would concern a dramatist at all. This essay will address itself to answering the question about Timon and...