Abstract

Abstract:

This article argues that the authors of Timon of Athens added debt and poetry to their source materials in order to track a deep affinity between these things. Timon's fall from wealth into want reveals that credit and debt are to a great extent constructed in the interplay of language, conduct, and interpretation. The play's treatment of poetry further suggests that persons enmeshed in webs of debt and credit become (at times unknowing) dissimulators. Though Timon ultimately presents debt’s poetry as a kind of universal falsification, the play offers glimpses of the utopian possibilities of artful language and indebtedness.

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