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= Timon_of_Athens =
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Introduction
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'The Life of Tymon of Athens', often shortened to 'Timon of Athens',
is a play written by William Shakespeare and likely also Thomas
Middleton in about 1606. It was published in the 'First Folio' in
1623. Timon lavishes his wealth on parasitic companions until he is
poor and rejected by them. He then denounces all of mankind, and
isolates himself in a cave in the wilderness.
The earliest-known production of the play was in 1674, when Thomas
Shadwell wrote an adaptation under the title 'The History of Timon of
Athens, The Man-hater'. Multiple other adaptations followed over the
next century, by writers such as Thomas Hull, James Love and Richard
Cumberland.
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.
'Timon of Athens' was originally grouped with the tragedies, but
recently some scholars name it as one of the problem plays.
Characters
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* Timon - a lord, and later a misanthrope, of Athens
* Alcibiades - captain of a military brigade and good friend of Timon
* Apemantus - sometimes spelled Apermantus, a philosopher and churl.
His name means "feeling no pain"
* Flavius - Timon's chief Steward
* Flaminius - Timon's servant
* Servilius - Timon's servant
* Lucilius - a romantic youth and Timon's servant
* Ventidius - also spelled "Ventidgius", one of Timon's "friends"
initially in debtors' prison
* Lucullus - Timon's "friend"
* Lucius - Timon's "friend"
* Sempronius - Timon's "friend"
* Poet and Painter - two friends and artists who seek Timon's
patronage
* Jeweller
* Merchant
* Senators of Athens
* Fool - briefly a companion to Apemantus
* Three Strangers, one named Hostilius - friends of Lucius
* The Old Athenian - the father of the woman Lucilius loves
* Four Lords - false friends of Timon
* Servants to Timon, Isidore, Lucullus, Lucius and Varro
* Titus, Hortensius and Philotus - Timon's creditors (Isidore and
Varro are also creditors, but only their servants appear)
* Phrynia - a prostitute
* Timandra - a prostitute
* Banditti
* Soldier
* Page
* Cupid - introduces the masque
* Ladies at the Masque
Synopsis
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Timon is a wealthy and generous Athenian gentleman. He hosts a large
banquet, attended by nearly all of Athens. Timon gives away money
wastefully, and everyone around him pleases him to receive more,
except for Apemantus, a churlish philosopher '(whose name means
"feeling no pain")' whose cynicism Timon cannot yet appreciate. He
accepts art from a poet and a painter, and a jewel from a jeweler,
only to later give his jewel away to another friend. Timon's servant,
Lucilius, has been wooing the daughter of an old Athenian. The
Athenian is furious with Lucilius's flirting, but Timon pays him three
talents to fund the couple's marriage, because the happiness of his
servant is worth the price. Timon is told that his friend, Ventidius,
is in debtors' prison. He sends money to pay for Ventidius's debt, and
Ventidius is released and attends Timon's banquet. Timon gives a
speech on the value of friendship, and later, the guests are
entertained by a masque, followed by dancing. As the party winds down,
Timon continues to wastefully give away to his friends: his horses, as
well as other possessions. The act is divided rather arbitrarily into
two scenes, but the experimental or unfinished nature of the play is
reflected in that it does not naturally break into a five-act
structure.
Unbeknownst to him, Timon has given away all his wealth, and is deep
in debt. Flavius, Timon's steward, is upset by the way Timon is
spending his wealth; overextending his munificence by showering
patronage over parasitic writers and artists, and saving his dubious
friends from their financial straits; Flavius confronts Timon when he
returns from a hunt. Timon is upset that Flavius did not warn him of
his debt before, and begins to direct his anger onto Flavius, who says
that he has tried repeatedly in the past without success, and now he
is at the end: all of Timon's land has been sold. Shadowing Timon is
another guest at the banquet: Apemantus, who terrorises Timon's
shallow companions with his caustic raillery. Along with a Fool, he
attacks Timon's creditors when they show up to make their demands for
immediate payment. Timon has no money to repay his debt, thus he sends
out his servants to request money from those friends he considers
closest.
Timon's servants are turned down, one by one, by Timon's false
friends. Elsewhere, one of Alcibiades's junior officers, in a rage,
kills a man in "hot blood". Alcibiades pleads with the Senate for
mercy, arguing that a crime of passion should not carry as severe a
sentence as premeditated murder. The senators disagree, and, when
Alcibiades persists, banish him forever. Alcibiades vows revenge, with
the support of his troops. The act finishes with Timon discussing with
his servants the revenge he will carry out at his next banquet.
Timon hosts a smaller party, intended only for those he feels have
betrayed him. The serving trays are set before the diners, but contain
only rocks and lukewarm water. Timon ambushes his false friends and
flees Athens. The loyal Flavius vows to find him.
Cursing the city walls, Timon goes into the wilderness and makes his
crude home in a cave, sustaining himself on roots. Here he discovers
an underground trove of gold. The knowledge of his discovery spreads.
Alcibiades, Apemantus, and three bandits are able to find Timon before
Flavius does. Accompanying Alcibiades are two prostitutes, Phrynia and
Timandra, who trade barbs with the bitter Timon on the subject of
venereal disease. Timon offers most of the gold to the rebel
Alcibiades to subsidise his assault on the city, which Timon now wants
to see destroyed, as his experiences have reduced him to misanthropy.
He gives the rest to his whores, to spread disease, and much of the
remainder to the poet and the painter, who arrive soon after, leaving
little for the senators who visit him. Apemantus appears and accuses
Timon of copying his pessimistic ways, and there is a mutually
misanthropic exchange of invective.
Flavius arrives. Flavius asks Timon for money as well, but also asks
for Timon to return to society. Timon acknowledges that he has had one
true friend in Flavius, a shining example of an otherwise diseased and
impure race, but laments that Flavius is a mere servant. He invites
the last set of envoys from Athens, who hoped Timon might placate
Alcibiades, to go hang themselves, and then dies in the wilderness.
Alcibiades, marching on Athens, throws down his glove, and ends the
play reading the bitter epitaph Timon wrote for himself, part of which
was composed by Callimachus:
Here lies a wretched corpse of wretched soul bereft:
Seek not my name: a plague consume you wicked caitiffs left!
Here lie I, Timon, who alive, all living men did hate,
Pass by, and curse thy fill, but pass and stay not here thy gait.
Date and text
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The play's date is uncertain, though its bitter tone links it with
'Coriolanus' and 'King Lear.' 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. It has been proposed that Shakespeare himself took the role of
the Poet, who has the fifth-largest line count in the play.
The play was entered into the Stationers' Register in 1623. There are
no contemporary allusions to the play by which its date of composition
may be determined, nor is there an agreed means of explaining the
play's "loose ends and inconsistencies". Editors since the twentieth
century have sought to remedy these defects through conjectures about
Shakespeare's emotional development (Chambers); hypotheses concerning
the play's "unfinished state" (Ellis-Fermor) and "scribal
interference" (Oliver); and through statistical analyses of
vocabulary, stage directions, and so forth.
Assuming the play is a collaboration between Shakespeare and
Middleton, its date has been placed in the period 1605-1608, most
likely 1606.
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. 'Timon' is notoriously
difficult to divide into acts, suggesting to Jowett that it was
written at a time when act divisions were of no concern to the writer,
hence it must have been written prior to August 1608. 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). In the context of the play, the line
is referring to religious zeal, but some scholars feel it is a subtle
reference to the events of November.
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'. This would narrow
the possible range of dates to sometime between November 1605 and
August 1608. Furthermore, MacDonald P. Jackson's rare-word test found
the conjectured Shakespearean parts of the text date to 1605-1606.
Going further, Jackson found that if one examines the
non-Shakespearean sections in the context of Middleton's career, a
date of 1605-1606 also results.
Sources
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Shakespeare, in writing the play, probably drew upon the twenty-eighth
novella of William Painter's 'Palace of Pleasure', the thirty-eighth
novella of which was the main source for his 'All's Well That Ends
Well'. He also drew upon Plutarch's 'Lives', and perhaps Lucian's
'Dialogues' and a lost comedy on the subject of Timon, allusions to
which survive from 1584. The historical figure of Timon of Athens was
already mentioned in Aristophanes's 'Lysistrata'; by Plato Comicus; in
Cicero's 'De Amicitia'; in Strabo's 'Geographica'; in Lucian's 'Timon
the Misanthrope'; and in Plutarch's 'Parallel Lives' (namely the
'Antony' and the 'Alcibiades').
Authorship
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Since the nineteenth century, suggestions have been made that 'Timon'
is the work of two writers, and it has been argued that the play's
unusual features are the result of the play being co-authored by
playwrights with very different mentalities; the most popular
candidate, Thomas Middleton, was first suggested in 1920.
The play contains several narrative inconsistencies uncharacteristic
of Shakespeare, an unusually unsatisfying 'dénouement', drastically
different styles in different places and an unusually large number of
long lines that do not scan. One theory is that the play as it appears
in the 'First Folio' is unfinished. E. K. Chambers believes
Shakespeare began the play, but abandoned it due to a mental
breakdown, never returning to finish it. F. W. Brownlow believes the
play to have been Shakespeare's last, and remained uncompleted at his
death.
The now-predominant theory of collaborative authorship
was proposed by Charles Knight in 1838.
Today, many scholars believe that other dramatist was Thomas
Middleton. However, the exact nature of the collaboration is disputed.
Did Middleton revise a piece begun by Shakespeare, did Shakespeare
revise Middleton's work, or did they work together? John Jowett,
editor of the play for both the 'Oxford Shakespeare: Complete Works'
and the individual Oxford Shakespeare edition, believes Middleton
worked with Shakespeare in an understudy capacity and wrote scenes 2
(1.2 in editions which divide the play into acts), 5 (3.1), 6 (3.2), 7
(3.3), 8 (3.4), 9 (3.5), 10 (3.6) and the last eighty lines of 14
(4.3).
A 1917 study by J. M. Robertson posited that George Chapman wrote "A
Lover's Complaint" and was the originator of 'Timon of Athens'. These
claims were rejected by other commentators, including Bertolt Brecht,
Frank Harris, and Rolf Soellner (1979), who thought the play was a
theatrical experiment. They argued that if one playwright revised
another's play it would have been "fixed" to the standards of Jacobean
theatre, which is clearly not the case. 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.
Linguistic analyses of the text have all discovered apparent
confirmation of the theory that Middleton wrote much of the play. It
contains numerous words, phrases, and punctuation choices that are
characteristic of his work but rare in Shakespeare. 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.
The evidence suggests that Middleton wrote around one third of the
play, mostly the central scenes. The editor of the Oxford edition,
John Jowett, states that Middleton,
wrote the banquet scene (Sc. 2), the central scenes with Timon's
creditors and Alcibiades' confrontation with the senate, and most of
the episodes figuring the Steward. The play's abrasively harsh humour
and its depiction of social relationships that involve a denial of
personal relationships are Middletonian traits[.]
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."
Analysis and criticism
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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. Frank Kermode
refers to the play as "a poor relation of the major tragedies." This
is the majority view, but the play has many scholarly defenders as
well. Nevertheless, and perhaps unsurprisingly due to its subject
matter, it has not proven to be among Shakespeare's popular works.
An anonymous play, 'Timon,' also survives. In this adaptation, Timon
is explicitly hedonistic and spends his money much more on himself
than in Shakespeare's version. He also has a mistress. It mentions a
London inn called The Seven Stars that did not exist before 1602, yet
it contains elements that are in Shakespeare's play but not in
Plutarch or in Lucian's dialogue, 'Timon the Misanthrope,' the other
major accepted source for Shakespeare's play. Both Jacobean plays deal
extensively with Timon's life before his flight into the wilderness,
which in both Greek versions is given little more than one sentence
each.
Soellner (1979) argues that the play is equal parts tragedy and
satire, but that neither term can adequately be used as an adjective,
for it is first and foremost a tragedy, and it does not satirise
tragedy; rather, it satirises its subjects in the manner of Juvenalian
satire while simultaneously being a tragedy.
Herman Melville considered 'Timon' to be among the most profound of
Shakespeare's plays, and in his 1850 review "Hawthorne and His Mosses"
writes that Shakespeare is not "a mere man of Richard-the-Third humps,
and Macbeth daggers," but rather "it is those deep far-away things in
him; those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him;
those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality: these are the
things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare. Through the mouths of the
dark characters of Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and Iago, he craftily says, or
sometimes insinuates the things, which we feel to be so terrifically
true, that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper
character, to utter, or even hint of them." In his 1590 'Greene's
Mourning Garment', Robert Greene used the term "Timonist" to refer to
a lonely misanthrope. In his 1852 novel 'Pierre', Melville used the
term "Timonism" about an artist's contemptuous rejection of both his
audience and mankind in general.
Appreciation of the play often pivots on the reader's perception of
Timon's asceticism. 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. This suggests a Timon who lives in the world but not of
it. 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.
Themes and motifs
===================
Major motifs in 'Timon' include dogs, breath, gold (from act IV on),
and "use" (in the sense of usury). One of the most common emendations
of the play is the Poet's line "Our Poesie Is as a Gowne, which uses
From whence 'tis nourisht", to "our poesy is as a gum, which oozes
from whence 'tis nourished" (originated by Pope and Johnson). Soellner
says that such emendations erode the importance of this motif, and
suggests a better emendation would be "from" to "form," creating a
mixed metaphor "revelatory of the poet's inanity."
One odd emendation that often appears near the end of the play is
Alcibiades commanding his troops to "cull th' infected fourth" from
the Senate, as if he intends to destroy a fourth of the Senate. 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.
Banquets and feasting in Shakespeare are dramatically significant;
besides sometimes being of central and structural importance, they
often present dramatic spectacles in themselves. The first banquet of
Timon of Athens reflects contemporary understandings of lavish
Athenian entertainment at which Timon celebrates friendship and
society. All the citizens are welcome to the banquet, as in accordance
with the democratic principles of Athens. 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. The senses are absent from this feast: Timon mocks
the insatiable appetite of his guests as he uncovers dishes of smoke
and water. Timon is misled by facades of friendship, and so inflicts
apropos revenge: misleading those that had misled him by having them
suffer the disillusionment of mortal senses with the mere spectacle of
a banquet.
Shakespeare includes the character of Alcibiades in the play, the
ultimate redeemer of iniquitous Athens. 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.
Performance history
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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.
The earliest known performance of the straight Shakespearean text was
at Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin in 1761.
The earliest-known production of a predominantly Shakespearean version
of the play in the United Kingdom was at Sadler's Wells in 1851.
It has played once on Broadway, at the Lyceum Theatre in 1993, with
Brian Bedford in the title role. This was a production of The Public
Theater, which revived the play in February 2011 with Richard Thomas
in the lead role, citing it as a play for the Great Recession.
The Chicago Shakespeare Theater first staged the play in 1997. It was
the company's first modern-dress production. In April 2012, C.S.T.
again staged the play with the Scottish actor Ian McDiarmid playing
Timon. The play was given a new ending by director Barbara Gaines.
In August 2011, the Hudson Shakespeare Company of New Jersey staged
'Timon of Athens' as part of their summer Shakespeare in the Parks
series. 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".
In July 2012 the British National Theatre produced a version of the
play set in modern dress and in the present time of scandal and fraud
in the City of London and the British media. The play was directed by
Nicholas Hytner. The National Theatre production was broadcast live to
cinemas worldwide on 1 November 2012 as part of the National Theatre
Live programme.
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, starring
Kathryn Hunter as Lady Timon, one of several gender changes. Hunter
and Godwin's version also had a run in New York City at Theatre for a
New Audience in Brooklyn. The show opened on 19 January 2020, and ran
through 9 February 2020. The following month the production played at
the Shakespeare Theater Company's Kline Theatre in Washington DC.
In 2024 the Australian Sport for Jove Theatre Company produced a
version called 'I Hate People; or Timon of Athens', directed by
Margaret Thanos and starring the company's artistic director Damien
Ryan, at the Everglades, Leura. The production was described by 'The
Sydney Morning Herald' as the "pinnacle of Shakespeare in Sydney this
century".
TV adaptations
================
Rarely performed, 'Timon of Athens' was produced for TV as part of the
BBC Television Shakespeare series in 1981 with Jonathan Pryce as
Timon, Norman Rodway as Apemantus, John Welsh as Flavius, and John
Shrapnel as Alcibiades, with Diana Dors as Timandra, Tony Jay as the
Merchant, Sebastian Shaw as the Old Athenian, and John Fortune and
John Bird as Poet and Painter. This Elizabethan/Jacobean historical
period drama production was directed by Jonathan Miller.
Film adaptations
==================
'I, Timon' was released in 2016 premiered at the 2017 Hoboken
International Film Festival (where it was nominated for "Best
Director" and "Best Cinematography"). Bramwell Noah appears in the
title role (and is also responsible for the original adaptation of the
play for the big screen). The film also features a soundtrack based on
the musical score Hexachordum Apollinis by Johann Pachelbel.
Play adaptations
==================
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. Shadwell added two women to the plot: Melissa, Timon's
faithless fiancee, and Evandre, his loyal and discarded mistress.
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.
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. His cast was primarily
young, and Apemantus was Algerian. Commentators who admire the play
typically see Timon as intended to have been a young man behaving in a
naïve way. The play's detractors usually cite an oblique reference to
armour in act IV as evidence that Timon is a long-retired soldier.
British playwright Glyn Cannon wrote a short adaptation of the play
called 'Timon's Daughter'. It premiered in May, 2008 at the Old
Fitzroy Theatre in Sydney. Cannon's play revisits the major themes of
charity and giving in the original work, with a story that follows the
adventures of Timon's daughter (named "Alice" in Cannon's play) when
she is taken in by Flavius (renamed "Alan").
Musical versions
==================
Shadwell's adaptation of the play was first performed with music by
Louis Grabu in 1678. More famously, the 1695 revival had new music by
Henry Purcell, most of it appearing in the masque that ended act 2.
Duke Ellington was commissioned to compose original music for the
Stratford Shakespeare Festival's first production of 'Timon of Athens'
in 1963. 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.
Cultural references
======================================================================
Ralph Waldo Emerson alludes to Timon in 'Essays: Second Series' (1844)
in an essay entitled "Gifts." Emerson says, "This giving is flat
usurpation, and therefore when the beneficiary is ungrateful, as all
beneficiaries hate all Timons ... I rather sympathize with the
beneficiary, than with the anger of my lord Timon."
Karl Marx discusses and quotes Timon in his 'Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844' and 'Das Kapital, Volume I'. Marx's
analysis focuses on how passages from 'Timon of Athens' (act IV, scene
III) shed light on the nature and amoral power of money:
# "It is the visible divinity - the transformation of all human and
natural properties into their contraries, the universal confounding
and distorting of things: impossibilities are soldered together by
it."
# "It is the common whore, the common procurer of people and nations."
Charlotte Brontë includes an allusion to Timon in 'Villette' (1853).
Ginevra Fanshawe affectionately nicknames Lucy "Timon," which
highlights Ginevra's role as a foil for Lucy. Herman Melville
references Timon repeatedly in his novel 'The Confidence-Man' (1857),
when referring to confidence as a preferable trait in all
circumstances to misanthropy. Charles Dickens alludes to Timon in
'Great Expectations' (1861) when Wopsle moves to London to pursue a
life in the theatre. Thomas Hardy alludes to Timon in his short story,
"The Three Strangers" (1883).
The English artist and writer Wyndham Lewis produced one work of art,
a portfolio of drawings titled "Timon of Athens" (1913), a preliminary
example of the style of art that would come to be called Vorticist.
Danish author Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) has a story within the tale
titled "The Deluge of Norderney" in her 'Seven Gothic Tales' (1934).
It tells about a Hamlet-like figure, called Timon of Assens , who
comes from the Danish town of Assens.
Vladimir Nabokov borrowed the title for his novel 'Pale Fire' (1962)
from this quotation of Timon's in act IV, scene III:
The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea: the moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun...
A copy of 'Timon of Athens' features variously in the plot of 'Pale
Fire' and, at one point, the quotation above is amusingly
mistranslated from the fictional language of Zemblan, a trademark
prank of the polyglot Nabokov. The theme of thievery to which Timon is
alluding is also a principal theme of 'Pale Fire', referring to
Charles Kinbote's misappropriation of the poem by the deceased John
Shade that forms part of the novel's structure.
References
======================================================================
* Butler, Francelia. 'The Strange Critical Fortunes of Shakespeare's
Timon of Athens'. Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1966.
* Oliver, H. J., ed. 'Timon of Athens'. The Arden Shakespeare. Surrey:
Methuen and Company, 1959.
External links
======================================================================
*
* , modern edited text by the Folger Shakespeare Library
* '[
https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/Texts/Tim/ Timon of
Athens]'Original spelling and Facsimiles from the Internet Shakespeare
Editions
*
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=========
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