Here’s a guy who justifiably goes off the rails, and just rails.
The title character in Shakespeare’s rarely performed tragedy, Timon of Athens, seems more Renaissance courtier than ancient Athenian, generously patronizing the arts and hosting banquets and revels for those he considers friends. Like the Earl of Oxford, though, he also seems to be not so fiscally responsible. When none of his fair-weather friends help bail him out of debt, he turns vicious misanthrope, retreats into the wilderness, and rails against anyone who comes along. There’s a happy ending, just not in this play.
The sketchy ending of the play, and the appearance of it as a corrupt manuscript having been included in the 1623 First Folio only as a last-minute replacement for the cancelled Troilus and Cressida, have Stratfordians assuming that Shakespeare didn’t finish revising this one, that it was abandoned and never performed in his time. Its dating as a late tragedy is conjectural and dependent on spurious dating of other plays with which it is seen as sharing “affinities” (Kermode 1490). Certainly, Shakespeare’s main source was North’s edition of Plutarch’s Life of Antony, in which a tangent appears concerning this fifth-century BCE misanthrope. Shakespeare significantly augments the Plutarchan sketch in this play which some feel functioned as a kind of “safety valve, through which Shakespeare blew off excess thought and emotion” (Goddard, II 172).
Besides Plutarch, Lucian’s Timon the Misanthrope seems to have been an influence, though translations were available only in Latin, French, and Italian. (An Inns of Court play named Timon is clearly a later academic effort.) The elder Ogburns suggest checking out Plato’s Symposium and Agathon, the charming hospitable host of a banquet for his friends after winning the prize for tragedy; his dinner is interrupted by revellers and a flute-playing girl (Ogburn and Ogburn 124).
It’s possible that an early version of Timon of Athens called The Historie of the Solitarie Knight, reflected, as Eva Turner Clark thinks, the Earl of “Oxford’s temporary eclipse upon his return from the Continent. The Queen was angry with him, and probably fair-weather friends sought more promising attachments” (Ogburn 584). This would mean the play was written in 1576 and performed first in February 1577 (Ogburn and Ogburn 110). Charlton Ogburn thinks the 1580s more likely, “when the sale of thirty tracts of land in five years left him stripped near as bare as Timon” (584; cf. Ogburn and Ogburn 114). De Vere was indeed extravagant. Thomas Nashe, in his 1593 Epistle Dedicatorie to Oxford, wrote:
how many pounds you have spent … upon the dirt of wisdom called Alchemy: Yes, you have been such an infinite Maecenas to learned men … [who] have tasted the cool streams of your liberalitie … I would speak in commendation of your hospitalitie…. (qtd. in Ogburn and Ogburn 117)
And the play does seem to warrant a much earlier date than is typically ascribed: “this is a schematic play, a parable in which the elements of the design lie close to the surface, and in which characters are more important for their contribution to the play’s pattern of ideas than as individuals. Indeed, many of them lack personal names” (Wells 274). The play is generally seen as a failure and has been called “the still-born twin of Lear” (qtd. in Wells 275). But other aspects are pretty fascinating in light of Oxfordian authorship.
Timon in the first part of the play was a deluded and foolish man, and in the last half a wild and frenzied one. But he was a lover of truth and sincerity. (Goddard, II 182)
As for why it ranks among Shakespeare’s lesser plays (and for the same reason as does All’s Well That Ends Well): “Timon is too raw, too real for comfort. It was begun too close to the catastrophe which prompted it. That must be why it was left artistically undigested, incomplete” (Edward Holmes, qtd. in Farina 181).
Timon of Athens, Act by Act
Timon of Athens Introduction
Further Resources
Filmography
Timon of Athens.
Timon of Athens. Dir. Jonathan Miller. Starring Jonathan Pryce. BBC, 1981.
I, Timon. 2016.
Timon of Athens. BBC/Opus Arte, 2019. Timon is a she.
Best Editions
Bevington, David, ed. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. 6th ed. Pearson Education Inc., 2009. 1293-1330.
Dawson, Anthony B. and Gretchen E. Minton, eds. Timon of Athens. The Arden Shakespeare. 3rd Series. NY: Bloomsbury, 2008.
Oxfordian Resources
Clark, Eva Turner. Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare’s Plays. 3rd ed. by Ruth Loyd Miller. Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1974. 47-59.
Farina, William. De Vere as Shakespeare: An Oxfordian Reading of the Canon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2006. 179-183.
Gilvary, Kevin. “Timon of Athens.” Dating Shakespeare’s Play’s. Ed. Kevin Gilvary. Tunbridge Wells, UK: Parapress, 2010. 349-355.
Hope, Warren. “Some Autobiographical Aspects of Timon of Athens.” In Is That True? Shakespearean Explorations. Ed. Gary Goldstein. Laugwitz Verlag, 2024. 75-79.
Ogburn, Charlton. The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth & The Reality. 2nd ed. McLean, VA: EPM Publications, Inc., 1992.
Ogburn, Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn. This Star of England. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, Pub., 1952. Esp. 110-125.
Showerman, Earl, M.D. Shakespeare’s Greater Greek. Kindle Direct, 2025. Chapter Timon of Athens: 132-161.
And Other General Resources
Goddard, Harold C. The Meaning of Shakespeare. Vol. 2. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951. 172-183.
Smidt, Kristian. Unconformities in Shakespeare’s Tragedies. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. 197-207. Smidt finds numerous time discrepancies suggesting significant revision, compression, and rearrangement of scenes.
Shakespeare Authorship Organizations
The Shakespeare Foundation. Dir. Alan W. Green. The sponsor of Shakespeare Illuminated. You say you want a revolution. Well….
The Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. Browse, get hooked, become a member.
The De Vere Society. Our Oxfordian friends and collaborators across the pond.
The Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable. We consider all possible authors behind the “Shakespeare” name.