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Timon of Athens was probably written between 1605 and 1608. Apparently, the play was never produced during Shakespeare’s lifetime, probably because, as many scholars argue, it was never finished. Alternatively, it may not have been produced because it focused on too controversial a topic for the years directly after King James I’s accession to the English throne. Timon of Athens contains a veiled but particularly sharp criticism of money management in James’s England, which would have been obvious to Shakespeare’s contemporaries and taken as criticism by his aristocratic supporters.
In this play, Timon is a wealthy man who takes great pleasure in giving gifts to his friends. But his downfall comes through his inability to support his spending; he takes out loans from his friends to pay for the very gifts he gives them. Eventually, he is forced to mortgage all his holdings and becomes bankrupt, and his friends abandon him.
In the early part of the seventeenth century, criticism grew for the traditional aristocratic behavior of extravagant generosity and careless expense when nobles’ holdings were increasingly unable to support their spending. With England on the rise as an international power, nobles found themselves competing to impress each other with their great expenditures, but they lacked the cash to back up their behavior. Hence, a new credit market arose. James I himself was known for his enormous debt, accrued in the process of providing his friends with expensive gifts. James’s behavior brought about huge deficits in the royal bank. Yet he was in good company with much of the aristocracy, who were all trying to manage great debts. Thus, this play draws attention to the irresponsible behavior of the upper classes, a criticism which alone could have kept this play from being sponsored or performed.
Shakespeare’s play also bears witness to a transformation in modes of financial exchange. In an earlier age, informal arrangements between friends were sufficient means for the exchange of money; it is this system that Timon functions under at the beginning of the play. In James’s England, the increasingly strained finances of the nobles meant that “friendly understandings” were insufficient as a basis for borrowing or lending money. Usury—a practice that involves borrowing money to be paid back with interest, often at very high rates—became a more widespread means of dealing with debt. Similarly, Timon finds that he cannot assume the ties of friendship will suffice to generate cash when he needs it; rather, his friends declare friendship is not security enough for a loan.
Like Shakespeare’s earlier work, The Merchant of Venice, Timon of Athens concerns itself with the connection between ties of affection and monetary bonds. Timon must discover how much friendship has to do with self-interest, how material goods compare to intangible feelings, and how much people are esteemed for their personal characteristics versus their possessions. The play has also been compared to King Lear because of the similarity of the hero’s fall from power and authority to destitution, and his fiercely misanthropic reaction to his demise.
Some scholars suggest that this play was co-written with another dramatist named Thomas Middleton, with certain sections attributed to Middleton instead of Shakespeare or vice versa. Nevertheless, some Shakespearean characteristics are unmistakable, such as the story’s derivation from Plutarch’s Lives, one of Shakespeare’s favorite sources for inspiration.
Some scholars think the play was never completed, which might seem a satisfactory explanation for various inconsistencies throughout the play. It’s possible that it was merely abandoned before the final stages of revision. No evidence exists proving the play was performed in Shakespeare’s day, a process that would certainly have smoothed over any rough edges and developed otherwise thin aspects of the play, such as the subplot concerning Alcibiades. However, an absence of evidence for the play’s performance does not conclusively mean it was never performed; indeed, the record on several other of Shakespeare’s more well-known plays is similarly thin.
