Friendship in William Shakespeare's Timon of Athens Research Paper

Friendship in William Shakespe atomic number 18s Timon of Athens - Research Paper ExampleThe presentation of masculine familiarity in the play has attained serious critical attention and the readers are able to recognize that Timons investment in his male friends and his passing of friends symbolized by his vanished gold are central to the ideas of friendship in the Renaissance. It is fundamental to maintain that gold in the play is the essential instrument of friendship and it takes the aim of the phallus, which is not only the phallus as absence, castration, or fear of feminine, and maternal power. As Karen Newman maintains, Timon of Athenss world of male/male love and enthusiastic friendship speaks through Plutarch and the wild figure of Alcibiages, whose relation with Timon and his phallic, golden gifts adumbrates another view of Jacobean gift giving. (Newman, 387) This paper undertakes a reflective exploration of the conventions of friendship in William Shakespeares Timon of Athens in relation to the ideas of friendship in the Renaissance in order to demonstrate how the conventions of friendship in the play are connected with Renaissance ideas of friendship.One of the major maintenances of the studies in Renaissance literature has been to investigate the link between the conventions of friendship in the literary works and ideas of friendship in Renaissance. William Shakespeare is a dramatist who has dealt extensively with the conventions of friendship all through his literary career, by means of his sonnets, long poems, comedies, tragedies, romances, and histories. Significantly, the theme of friendship has been a central concern of the playwright and his famous works personify the theme of friendship through the friendship of Hamlet and Horatio in Hamlet, Rosalind and Celia in As You Like It, and Hal and Falstaff in the enthalpy IV plays. Therefore, it is an indisputable fact that Shakespeares plays deal with the theme of friendship and it is substan tiated by his iconographic representation of false friendship in his late tragedy The feeling of Timon of Athens. One of the most essential aspects of the concept of friendship as presented in this play is that Shakespeare presents it in contrast to the existing ideas of friendship in the Renaissance. As graham flour Hammill observes, While humanist models of male friendship emphasize the equality of friendships and the permanence of the bonds between them, early modern English drama stages friendship as scarce the opposite. (Hammill, 924) Therefore, it is fundamental to comprehend that Shakespeares Timon of Athens provides a contrasting idea of friendship to the prevalent conventions of friendship during the Renaissance. One of the distinguishing features of the representation of friendship in Shakespearian plays, especially Timon of Athens, is the fact that they reflect the general method in Renaissance literature to represent friendship (frequently between males) in opposition to love and straightaway union in marriage. Timon of Athens is a play which deals exclusively with the theme of