Shakespeare Learns the Value of Money: The Dramatist at Work on Timon of Athens

Summary

Timon of Athens has for more than a century been the object of a good deal of speculation; and the workmanship of another hand was for long seen in the apparently weaker parts of the play. But several critics during the last two decades have endeavoured to show that there is more unity of theme and treatment in this play than was commonly supposed. Some of this very detailed analysis may be unconvincing, but most of the discussion has in recent years been concerned with deciding whether the play, as we have it, is in a finished or an unfinished state. Sir Edmund Chambers revived an old suggestion that the weakness of parts of the play was due to their being still in rough draft. That the play as printed in the Folio is in an incomplete state was likewise surmised by Sir Walter Greg, drawing particular attention to the stage-directions (“Some read almost more like directions for composition than production”); and Professor Una Ellis-Fermor has, on literary grounds, persuasively argued the same opinion.

This may be regarded as one of the most important outstanding problems of Shakespearian scholarship. If we could feel confident that the play is in part still in rough draft, then we should have a unique opportunity of getting close to Shakespeare's method of writing during the years of his greatest creative activity. We should be confirmed in our belief that he was a conscientious artist, prepared to correct and revise his work; and we could draw several interesting conclusions regarding his manner of constructing a play: that he put structure before composition, taking care, even in an early draft, to unify his play by means of ironic preparation and anticipation, symbolic contrast of plot and sub-plot, 'chorus-statements' by disinterested observers, iterative wx)rds, etc., but paying little attention, at first, to the characterization of minor personages and to the prose-verse form of the speeches.