A rich Athenian gives away his whole fortune, then finds that not one friend will lend him a penny
His steward Flavius is the only honest man in the play
Shakespeare · Tragedies
Timon of Athens
c. 1605–08
Tragedy — written with Thomas Middleton, from Plutarch and Lucian
The least performed and most peculiar of the tragedies, written with Thomas Middleton and apparently left unfinished. A rich and lavishly generous Athenian gives away his fortune to flatterers, discovers when he is ruined that not one of them will lend him anything, serves them a mock banquet of warm water and stones, and leaves the city to live in a cave by the sea, cursing mankind. Digging for roots, he finds gold, and gives it away again to soldiers and prostitutes to further the ruin of Athens. He dies offstage, leaving an epitaph that curses everyone who reads it.
How to spot them
- ▸Athens; a man ruined by his own open-handedness and abandoned by every friend
- ▸A mock banquet of lukewarm water and stones
- ▸A cave by the sea, and gold turned up while digging for roots
- ▸Probably never staged in Shakespeare's lifetime, and printed only because a Folio gap needed filling
- ▸A snarling philosopher who was right from the start
Scenes, characters & lines
A banquet of warm water and stones, thrown in the guests' faces
'Uncover, dogs, and lap'
'I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind'
Announced to Alcibiades outside the walls
Digging for roots outside the city, a hermit finds gold and gives it to an army and two prostitutes
The gold is used to fund the sack of Athens
Apemantus, a churlish philosopher who tells the truth nobody wants to hear
The two misanthropes abuse each other at length in the cave scene
'Gold? yellow, glittering, precious gold?'
The tirade on money that Karl Marx quoted at length
An epitaph on a tomb by the sea's edge, cursing everyone who reads it
'Seek not my name'; the two epitaphs in the text contradict each other, a sign the play was unfinished
Key ideas
- Marx quoted the gold speech in the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and again in Capital, as a picture of money dissolving all human bonds
- The play has no women's parts of any size, no love plot and no subplot — an anti-comedy as much as a tragedy
Quick-fire facts
- •About a third of the play is now attributed to Thomas Middleton, making it one of Shakespeare's collaborations
- •There is no record of a performance in Shakespeare's lifetime, and the text survives only in the First Folio
- •It appears in the Folio in the space intended for Troilus and Cressida, apparently inserted when the rights to that play were in doubt; its page numbering is irregular as a result
- •The sources are the digression on Timon in Plutarch's Life of Antony and Lucian's dialogue Timon the Misanthrope
- •The steward Flavius, the cynic Apemantus and the general Alcibiades are the principal other parts
- •Thomas Shadwell's adaptation of 1678 added two women and held the stage into the eighteenth century
- •Duke Ellington wrote incidental music for a 1963 production at the Stratford Festival in Ontario; Stephen Oliver's opera was staged in 1991
- •Loose ends and duplicated speeches — including two different epitaphs — are usually taken as evidence the manuscript was never finished for the stage
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- Folger Shakespeare Library — Timon of Athens
- Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton (eds.) — Timon of Athens (The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series)