The Arden Shakespeare Timon of Athens (review)

Lord Timon, extravagantly bountiful, spends beyond his means and suffers a credit crisis. Asked by Alcibiades, who meets him in the woods, how Athenian society's paragon of urban largesse has become a half-naked, cave-dwelling misanthrope, Timon answers, "As the moon does, by wanting light to give; / But then renew I could not like the moon—/ There were no suns to borrow of " (4.3.68–70). Unable to replenish his coffers, Timon leaves the city and throws himself upon the mercies of "mother" earth (l. 176) grubbing in the ground for life-sustaining roots. In Timon's disillusioned mind, his problem takes on global dimensions, as he sets human transactions within a whole cosmology based on "thievery" (ll. 419–44, esp. l. 430). Timon of Athens would seem to be a play for our time.

Karl Marx famously cited Timon's magnificent diatribes as critiques of the "'cash nexus'" (72n1). Dawson and Minton give full weight to the play's economic concerns, while subtly exploring all the other elements that go into its peculiar generic mix of satire, tragedy, and allegory. Timon is unusually schematic. While Hamlet encourages diverse readings because of its rich complexity, opposing views of Timon—and of Apemantus and Alcibiades, who serve as foils—stem from the simplicity of the hero's characterization and his riches-to-rags story. Is he, before his fall, Ideal Bounty or Reckless Prodigality? There is a notable paucity of data that might help us get our moral bearings. Timon is given no family and little background. But there is an abundance of internal commentary. Act 3, scene 2, even brings on three strangers as "choric figures" who, as the editors say in a typically nuanced note, "voice what appears to be a morally sound perspective on the venality of Timon's friends (though their claims for virtue in the final lines of the scene may strike some readers as a little inflated)" (3.2n1). But the play seems to incorporate, through a multiplicity of comments made and attitudes struck, all possible interpretations of its action.¹

Timon is notorious also for its textual oddities, structural anomalies, and loose ends. It might never have been included in the Shakespeare First Folio had not a temporary difficulty over copyright for Troilus and Cressida left a gap to be filled. The manuscript draft behind the Folio appears not to have been tidied up for performance. Dawson and Minton recognize the compelling nature of the evidence that Timon was jointly written by Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton, and they assume that coauthorship is responsible for some of the text's inconsistencies, disjunctions, and failures of integration. Their survey of the scholarly issues of text, date, sources, and authorship is excellent, and their lively awareness of Middleton's contribution is built into a critical introduction that, in its sensitivity to shifts of tone and mode, could scarcely be bettered as an account of the special qualities of this problematic play. They draw on critics as dissimilar as Kenneth Burke and Coppélia Kahn, and they make illuminating comparisons to other works, including The Merchant of Venice, which shares with Timon several themes and sources of imagery: money, borrowing, usury (the "breeding" of money), and cannibalism. Their pages are spiced with details from a range of stage productions, besides including a separate performance history.

Dawson and Minton pay tribute to John Jowett, who has edited Timon three times. Comparing their text to that of Jowett's splendid stand-alone Oxford edition (2004), I find myself, when they differ, sometimes inclining towards Jowett's choice of reading, whether F's or an emendation, and sometimes towards Dawson and Minton's. But the operative word there is "inclining": Dawson and Minton are judicious editors; their textual notes are nearly always cogent and to the point. Among good examples are those justifying their reduction of the Folio...