PREFATORY NOTE

Summary

In Pericles Mr Maxwell tackled the insoluble problems of a thoroughly bad text. In Timon of Athens he was confronted with something texually better but dramatically scarcely less baffling. An unfinished Shakespearian play offers of course an almost unlimited field for speculation. Who for example was to bury Timon, and presumably rear his gravestone? And if the faithful Flavius be suggested as a not improbable candidate, that only provokes further questions. Would he not then have been given a funeral oration in soliloquy? And if so might he not have furnished us with a clue, perhaps the master clue, to the enigma of the misanthrope's character? Mr Maxwell wisely leaves such questions to the type of amateur novelist who finishes Edwin Drood to his own satisfaction but no one else's. Yet I think many readers of pages xxii–xlii below will agree with me that he has come nearer to fathoming Shakespeare's intentions than any previous critic and probably as near as will ever be possible.