Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T15:05:41.539Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

INTRODUCTION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2010

Get access

Summary

AUTHENTICITY AND DATE

The Life of Tymon of Athens was first printed in the 1623 Folio, in the space in the Tragedies left by the temporary withdrawal of Troilus and Cressida. It is at least possible that it was not originally intended to print it at all, and the rough condition of the text has given rise to many speculations. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the blame was generally laid on actors, transcribers and printers, and Charles Knight in the Pictorial Shakespeare (1838) seems to have been the first to suggest the presence of a second hand other than that of a mere garbler. His view was that our text represents Shakespeare's partial rewriting of an earlier play, and since his time all possible variations have been devised on the disintegration theme. Some have agreed with Knight; others, following Verplanck's edition of 1847, have thought that an unfinished or mutilated play by Shakespeare was botched up by a later hand. The two views can even be combined. Thus G. Kullmann solemnly argued that Shakespeare began to rewrite an earlier play, that the manuscripts of both versions were somehow preserved together, and that a ‘redactor’, the real villain of the piece, conflated them and added further confusions of his own. Almost all dramatists active in the first decade of the seventeenth century have at one time or another been called in to take a hand in the making or marring of Timon.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Life of Timon of Athens
The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare
, pp. ix - xlii
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009
First published in: 1957

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×