In Othello (1604), one of Shakespeare's great tragedies, Iago, who hates Othello, pretends to be Othello's friend in order to destroy him.

In The Scarlet Letter (1850), Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel of New England Puritanism, Roger Chillingworth, a physician, pretends to be the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale's friend and takes on the care of the clergyman's troubled soul in order to discover his terrible secret.

A. E. Houseman's poem “Is My Team Plowing?” in his collection A Shropshire Lad (1896), is written in a rhyming pattern similar to that of “A Poison Tree.” In Houseman's poem, one of the two speakers gently deceives his dead interlocutor, or the other person in the discussion, about the way things are after his death.

In Sherwood Anderson's short story “Hands,” included in the collection Winesburg, Ohio (1919), the fate of the gentle Wing Biddlebaum testifies to the evils of...