SOURCE: "Timon of Athens: The Iconography of False Friendship," in The Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. XLIII, No. 3, Summer, 1980, pp. 181-200.

In the following essay, Davidson examines Timon of Athens from an iconographic perspective, asserting that Timon "himself must be seen as a highly significant icon 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. [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, which will be Macbeth's...