Timon of Athens

by William Shakespeare

many of the apparent peculiarities of the text do not reflect Shakespeare’s disordered intellect or dissatisfaction with his own work, but instead result from his writing the play in collaboration with another dramatist, Thomas Middleton. 1

The oscillation between harsh but comic satire and vehement rage results in part from the shifts between Middleton and Shakespeare.

Shakespeare concentrated on the opening, the scenes dealing most fully with Timon him...

the play departs from Shakespearian patterns in ways that are not dependent on Middleton’s contribution. As a tragedy it is anomalous because the titular hero fades into an anticlimactic death off stage. As a depiction of social life it is deeply abnormal because it almost entirely excludes women and children. As a drama it resorts to the remarkable and apparently untheatrical device of having almost a third of its action made up of the single sequence in which Timon, statically dwelling in the woods, is visited by a succession of Athenians. By such means the play develops as an extreme drama with its extreme view of life.

It was one of sixteen previously unpublished plays that were entered in the Stationers’ Register on 8 November 1623. No earlier document mentions it or relates to it.

The following discussion leads towards a suggested date of early 1606.

The story told in Timon of Athens of self-exclusion from society and the play’s angry mood show particular affinities with King Lear (1605–6) and with Coriolanus (1608?).

Shakespeare drew on Plutarch’s ‘Life of Marcus Antonius’ for Julius Caesar (1599) and again for Antony and Cleopatra (1606?). When writing Coriolanus, he would have found the ‘Life of Alcibiades’ paired with that of Coriolanus. Both of these ‘Lives’ mention Timon, and so it is possible to imagine Shakespeare enco...

Shakespeare had studied Plutarch’s ‘Marcus Antonius’ for Julius Caesar before 1600, and he mentions ‘critic Timon’ as early...

he would have found an account of Timon based ultimately on Plutarch in William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure, the main source for...

the absence of act divisions in the Folio text give an immediate clue as to the play’s date. They suggest that it was written before the company began performing with act intervals, a change introduced as a result of their occupancy of the Blackfriars Theatre in August 1608.

This is a play written without regard to a performable five-act structure, and with no sign that performance at the Blackfriars was a consideration.

MacD. P. Jackson, after analysing Shakespeare’s share in a test examining the distribution of rare vocabulary, placed the play at 1604–5.

These investigations strikingly converge in suggesting that Timon of Athens was written in 1604–6. They weigh firmly agai...

In view of the date of Bloody Murders, it is significant that there is a probable reference to the Gunpowder Plot, discovered on 4 November 1605. At 7.31–3 Timon’s Servant refers to ‘those that under hot ardent zeal would set whole realms on fire’.

is evidently closest of all to King Lear, the Shakespeare play with which it has the strongest affinities of plot, style, and philosophical disillusionment—so close, indeed, that it is impossible to be sure which was written first.

Timon of Athens belongs to the most magnificently productive phase of Shakespeare’s tragic writing.