Timon of Athens (Vol. 52) - John Dixon Hunt (essay date 1988)
John Dixon Hunt (essay date 1988)
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...
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