Timon of Athens
[2] The straight Shakespearean text was performed at Smock Alley in Dublin in 1761, but adaptations continued to dominate the stage until well into the 20th century.
The Athenian is furious with Lucilius' flirting, as a result, but Timon pays him three talents to fund for the couple's marriage, because the happiness of his servant is worth the price.
John Day's play Humour Out of Breath, published in 1608, contains a reference to "the lord that gave all to his followers, and begged more for himself" – a possible allusion to Timon that would, if valid, support a date of composition before 1608.
Editors since the twentieth century have sought to remedy these defects through conjectures about Shakespeare's emotional development (Chambers);[12]: p.86 hypotheses concerning the play's "unfinished state" (Ellis-Fermor) and "scribal interference" (Oliver); and through statistical analyses of vocabulary, stage directions, and so forth.
In his 2004 edition for the Oxford Shakespeare, John Jowett argues the lack of act divisions in the Folio text is an important factor in determining a date.
The King's Men only began to use act divisions in their scripts when they occupied the indoor Blackfriars Theatre in August 1608 as their winter playhouse.
[13] A terminus post quem may come from a possible topical allusion to the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605; "those that under hot ardent zeal would set whole realms on fire" (scene 7, 32–33[14]).
[15] The play may also have been influenced by a pamphlet published in June 1605, Two Unnatural and Bloody Murders, which served as the primary source for Thomas Middleton's A Yorkshire Tragedy.
[27] These claims were rejected by other commentators, including Bertolt Brecht,[28] Frank Harris,[29] and Rolf Soellner (1979), who thought the play was a theatrical experiment.
Soellner believed the play is unusual because it was written to be performed at the Inns of Court, where it would have found a niche audience with young lawyers.
These linguistic markers cluster in certain scenes, apparently indicating that the play is a collaboration between Middleton and Shakespeare, not a revision of one's work by the other.[11]: pp.
2 Jowett stresses that Middleton's presence does not mean the play should be disregarded, stating "Timon of Athens is all the more interesting because the text articulates a dialogue between two dramatists of a very different temper."[11]: p.
2 Many scholars find much unfinished about this play including unexplained plot developments, characters who appear unexplained and say little, prose sections that a polished version would have in verse (although close analysis would show this to be almost exclusively in the lines of Apemantus, and probably an intentional character trait), and the two epitaphs, one of which doubtless would have been cancelled in the final version.
However, similar duplications appear in Julius Caesar and Love's Labour's Lost and are generally thought to be examples of two versions being printed when only one was ultimately used in production, which could easily be the case here.
Admirers like Soellner point out that Shakespeare's text has Timon neither drink wine nor eat meat: only water and roots are specifically mentioned as being in his diet, which is also true of Apemantus.
If one sees Timon's parties not as mere excuses to have fun, but as vain attempts to genuinely win friends among his peers, he gains sympathy.
This is true of Pryce's Timon in the television version mentioned below, whose plate is explicitly shown as being perpetually unsoiled by food, and he tends to be meek and modest.
Other versions, often by creators who regard the play as a lesser work, involve jazz-era swinging (sometimes, such as in the Michael Langham/Brian Bedford production (in which Timon eats flamingo) set to a score that Duke Ellington composed for it in the 1960s), and conclude the first act with a debauchery.
The Arkangel Shakespeare audio recording featuring Alan Howard (with Rodway reprising his television role) also takes this route: Howard's line readings suggest that Timon is getting drunker and drunker during the first act; he does not represent the moral or idealistic figure betrayed by the petty perceived by Soellner and Brecht the way Pryce does.
The word in the folio is, in fact, "forth", suggesting that "th' infected" are simply the ones who argued strongly against the cases of Timon and Alicibiades's officer, and that the troops are to leave alone those who just went along with it.
The second banquet functions as a parody of the first, as Timon uses it to exact revenge on his false friends, before abandoning feasting and the city completely by exiling himself.
He would have been known among the educated of the audience for his presence at the Greek banquet in Plato's Symposium at which he gets the last word on the nature of love, proposing that it cannot be found in superficial appearance.
[34] Performance history in Shakespeare's lifetime is unknown, though the same is also true of his more highly regarded plays such as Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, which most scholars believe were written in the same period.
As a departure from several other modern dress productions, director Jon Ciccarelli set the action in the "Roaring 20s" with corrupt politicians, mobsters and making the characters of Alcibiades, Timon of Athens and Flavius veterans of World War I. Timon (Imran Sheikh) was portrayed as a 'Great Gatsby' type figure who loses his great fortune to corrupt "friends".
[40] From 7 December 2018 to 22 February 2019 the play was revived by the Royal Shakespeare Company in a version directed by Simon Godwin, also in modern dress and featuring contemporary visual allusions,[41] starring Kathryn Hunter as Lady Timon, one of several gender changes.
In 1678 Thomas Shadwell produced a popular adaptation, The History of Timon of Athens, the Man-Hater, to which Henry Purcell later composed the music.
James Dance made another adaptation in 1768, soon followed by Richard Cumberland's version at Drury Lane in 1771, in which the dying Timon gives his daughter, Evadne, not present in Shakespeare's original, to Alcibiades.
Further adaptations followed in 1786 (Thomas Hull's at Covent Garden) and 1816 (George Lamb's at Drury Lane), ending with an 1851 production reinstating Shakespeare's original text by Samuel Phelps at Sadler's Wells.
[49] Peter Brook directed a French-language production in the sixties in which Timon was portrayed as an innocent idealist in a white tuxedo, ripped and dishevelled in the second part.
Stephen Oliver, who wrote the incidental music for the BBC television version, composed a two-act opera, Timon of Athens, which was first performed at the London Coliseum on 17 May 1991.
