THE COPY FOR TIMON OF ATHENS, 1623

Summary

The bibliographical facts of the printing of Timon in the Folio show that it was not originally intended to occupy its present position—perhaps not to be printed at all. It occupies the space left by the withdrawal, as a result of copyright difficulties, of Troilus and Cressida, and even with the addition of the list of ‘Actors Names’ on a separate page with blank verso, there is a gap in the signatures between hh 6 and kk, and in the pagination between 98 and 109.

In the Introduction, I have given reasons for accepting what is now the orthodox view that the source of the Folio Timon is Shakespeare's incomplete draft. Whether such a draft was actually the printer's copy, it is not so easy to be sure. Recent scholars have generally believed that it was, notably Sir Walter Greg, who has ‘no doubt that F was printed from foul papers that had never been reduced to anything like order’. But Professor Fredson Bowers in On Editing Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Dramatists (1955) has attacked the tendency to assume ‘foul papers’ copy too readily, and writes of certain ‘finer-grained evidence’ used by the late Philip Williams: ‘When on such evidence Dr Williams can confidently pronounce the Timon of Athens printer's copy to have been scribal rather than unfinished author's foul papers, as conjectured by Greg, chaos has come again in the question of Shakespearian printer's copy’.