What Do I Read Next?
- In Othello (1604), one of Shakespeare's renowned tragedies, Iago, who despises Othello, feigns friendship to orchestrate Othello's downfall.
- In The Scarlet Letter (1850), Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel depicting New England Puritanism, Roger Chillingworth, a physician, pretends to be Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale's friend. He takes on the care of the troubled clergyman to uncover his dark secret.
- A. E. Houseman's poem "Is My Team Plowing?" from his collection A Shropshire Lad (1896), follows a rhyming pattern akin to "A Poison Tree." In this poem, one speaker gently deceives his deceased interlocutor about the state of affairs after his death.
- In Sherwood Anderson's short story "Hands," from the collection Winesburg, Ohio (1919), the fate of the kind-hearted Wing Biddlebaum illustrates the destructive power of sexual repression and uncontrolled anger.
- In Igor Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress (1951), with a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, Nick Shadow (the Devil) befriends Tom Rakewell. He entices Tom with promises of wealth, happiness, and fame, leading him away from love and virtue into madness and death.
- In Patrick Hamilton's play Gas Light (1939), later adapted into the film Gaslight (1944) directed by George Cukor, the main character pretends to be a devoted husband but is actually driving his wife insane and plotting her murder.
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