Page "Timon of Athens" Paragraph 87

Herman Melville considered Timon to be among the most profound of Shakespeare's plays, and in his 1850 review " Hawthorne and His Mosses " writes that Shakespeare is not " a mere man of Richard-the-Third humps, and Macbeth daggers ," but rather " it is those deep far-away things in him ; those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him ; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality :– these are the things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare.

Through the mouths of the dark characters of Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and Iago, he craftily says, or sometimes insinuates the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true, that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint of them.

" In his 1590 Greene's Mourning Garment, Robert Greene used the term " Timonist " to refer to a lonely misanthrope.

In his 1852 novel Pierre, Melville used the term " Timonism " about an artist's contemptuous rejection of both his audience and mankind in general.